Things that I find really slow it down are accessing your music over the network, especially when it's doing things like checking for gapless information and updating artwork. Things it does every time you add new tracks and that you cannot (in any way) disable. You can cancel, but it will do it again/continue the next time you add tracks or restart iTunes.
Yeah, the big slowdown for our newly network-ized iTunes library is when a lot of new music is added to the library on one computer, and then the other computer logs on and takes forever to update the genius information. I'm not sure why this isn't stored along with the library on the network, therefore only requiring one copy of the information, but whatever.
Song Bird developers defend this by saying that they're not copying, they just implementing the most reasonable methods, which iTunes just so happens to also use. Yeah right.
I'm not a huge fan of how either one does it, but at least Songbird has more potential for improvement, IMO, due to add-ons. For instance, my Songbird installation is fundamentally different from how it works by default and how iTunes works, because I have a Now Playing add-on that creates a sort of fusion of iTunes and Windows Media Player. Normally I'd say "great, two terrible music managers in one!" but I really like how this works now. Anyway, I'm a huge Songbird fan, and I'll say again: it does something that iTunes is completely incapable of and most likely never will be: syncing with my G1 (and almost any device, for that matter).
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