This depends entirely on how naive the sqlite implementation is - without exact implementation details and register values for the QSPI peripheral, it's hard to

This depends entirely on how naive the sqlite implementation is - without exact implementation details and register values for the QSPI peripheral, it's hard to remote diagnose something like that. Have you used a digital logic analyzer to figure out how long reading the page takes, how many pages SQLite reads for that query, and how much work SQLite has to do before it can fetch the next page? I haven't seen any ESP32 SQLite ports that can eagerly fetch pages, even though it's relatively simple to do with DMA (but would require some significant changes to SQLite because it's designed to be ignorant of OS preemption which is not the case in most RTOSes).