Do you use Windows? Anytime I hear that software is "bloated" it comes from a Windows user. iTunes is very fast on my computer and I have over 25 GB of media.
I have a 2.5 GHz C2D MBP running 10.6.4. My iTunes library is just a hair under 425 GB, and iTunes gets slower and more bloated with every release. The latest version is painfully slow, even with basically every extraneous feature (home sharing, equaliser, sound check, the Store , etc.) disabled and no other applications running.
How painfully slow? Well, let's have an example...here's what I have to do if I want to, say, change a batch of tags (even if iTunes isn't importing or playing anything at the time):
1) Click the first track.
2) Wait 5-10 seconds for iTunes to register the click.
Optional:
3) Scroll down using the scroll wheel
4) Wait 10-20 seconds for iTunes to register the scroll
5) Swear because I scrolled too far, then repeat steps 3-4 to scroll back up
6) Shift-click the last of the tracks I'm editing
7) Wait 5-10 seconds for iTunes to register the click
8) Hit Command-I to open the track info dialogue box
9) Wait 10-20 seconds
10) Type in the new tag info (for some reason, this process is remarkably speedy)
11) Hit enter to accept the changes
12) Wait 5-10 seconds PER TRACK for iTunes to make the changes. Double or triple this time if the changes were made from the main Library:Music view rather than while viewing a playlist. Add even MORE time if the changes involved album art.
You may notice a pattern in the above list. This delay between command issuance and interface response is nearly universal throughout the application. Even basic functions like "play", "pause", and "next track" frequently involve a 15-30 second wait between the issuing of the command and the actual execution of the command. Clicking a column header to re-sort the track list results in a delay. Hitting Enter while a track is selected (to change the name) results in a delay, which usually results in me hitting Enter a second time because I don't think the first one took, which results in the name being editable for a quarter of a second as both Enters are finally executed in rapid-fire, prompting me to hit Enter again, etc...
And this is just for simple tag editing and playback control, with nothing else going on. God help me if I'm running a web browser at the same time and/or trying to do a task that requires lots of CPU time, in which case you can double or triple the wait time for each task listed above. Importing a CD, for example, involves 30-second (at least) freezes at the end of each track, presumably while iTunes updates the Library file. This is frequently longer than the actual conversion process took for a given track, and of course it involves all other tasks being delayed even further as iTunes throws up an empty alert box over the main window as each track is added.
I've come to believe that iTunes just isn't very good at handling large libraries. iTunes 9 wasn't much faster, but 10 made things noticeably and immediately worse. (7 was the best of recent versions in my memory.) It would be a tough sell to convince me that it has nothing to do with the new "features" that have been added.
