@Jeff_Lockhart - I believe that in this case the OP’s issue was that the procedure used to open a DB connection was repeatedly performing key derivation. This is the number one cause of poor performance with SQLCipher. Many applications using SQLite assume that opening a DB connection is a fast operation, and that is not the case with SQLCipher.
As a result SQLCipher’s locking behavior is not relevant to this user’s issue (or to be honest, the vast majority of the performance problems that people report). We definitely recognize and share your interest in improving locking. We also understand that your application is already optimized enough that concurrently issues are the main performance block. However, for most applications, like the one in this thread, the items in the SQLCipher Performance Optimization FAQ are most appropriate as a first line of investigation.