On my Atom netbook 1,6Ggh I have:

<verbatim>
$ time fossil clone sqlite-src.fossil
                Bytes      Cards  Artifacts     Deltas
Send:              49          1          0          0
Received:     1607865      34952          0          0
Send:           10025        225          0          0
Received:      138945        244          7        193
Send:           18849        415          0          0
Received:      153088        430          3        397
Send:           37649        801          0          0
Received:      876957        830         71        729
Send:           75249       1601          0          0
Received:     1018521       1630         63       1537
Send:          150449       3201          0          0
Received:     1896100       3230         63       3137
Send:          300849       6401          0          0
Received:     3211644       6430         91       6309
Send:          601649      12801          0          0
Received:     5286633      12830        176       6867
Send:          662091      14087          0          0
Received:     5726286      14116        183       5387
Send:          457735       9739          0          0
Received:     5348552       9768        166       2971
Send:          294927       6275          0          0
Received:     5248224       6304        281        629
Send:           85589       1821          0          0
Received:     5006033       1850        486       1323
Send:          170095       3619          0          0
Received:     5147248       3648        132        472
Send:           56825       1209          0          0
Received:     3077764       1238        123       1085
Send:           97339       2071          0          0
Received:     5100687       2100        291       1027
Send:           35393        753          0          0
Received:     5010920        782        170        445
Send:            6488        138          0          0
Received:     3018371        167         66         71
Total network traffic: 1607303 bytes sent, 19503853 bytes received
Rebuilding repository meta-data...
34951 (100%)...
project-id:
server-id:
admin-user: veter (password is "******")

real	7m3.915s
user	2m22.817s
sys	0m10.765s

$ ls -hl sqlite-src.fossil
-rw-r--r-- 1 veter veter 32M Окт  6 21:58 sqlite-src.fossil
</verbatim>

I think the speed of 77 kB/s is really slow. Well, the "Rebuilding repository meta-data..." state can be slow... but why is slow the artifacts downloading and inserting?

See this test:
<verbatim>
$ time sqlite3 sqlite-src.fossil '.dump'>sqlite.dump

real	0m3.276s
user	0m2.780s
sys	0m0.460s

$ time sqlite3 sqlite-src2.fossil '.read sqlite.dump'

real	0m14.839s
user	0m13.357s
sys	0m0.396s
</verbatim>

Yes, SQLite is fast and Fossil is very slow.