I have about 130 gb of music and 3 gb of music videos.

As my collection has filled up, itunes performance has really gotten bad.

I read somewhere that this is due to the fact that itunes uses one big xml file for everything from number of times played to rating, etc.

My itunes library file is 36.6mb and the itunes music library file is 39.6mb

everytime i do anything in the program, it has to access and rewrite this gigantic 39.6mb file.

Just wondering if in the future itunes might clean up its act, or if there's a better way.

(For Comparison:)

I use foobar 0.9.5 beta 7 to manage my library which has approx 60,000 mp3s. I have about 20 playlists, which have some 30,000 tracks between them.

The startup time is ~7 secs, and it uses about 95 MB ram when playing songs. The database size is 21 MB.

I have more than that and didn't notice any reduction of performance (because of iTunes.)

My collection is about that same size, but performance is swift and without problems. iTunes takes about 2 seconds to load its library at startup (with a small progress bar dialog) but then its done and ready to roll. Cover Flow, adding/subtracting content, creating playlists - no delays at all.

I run iTunes on 2 very different machines without issues:

Slow: WinXP, Pentium M 1.6ghz, 1.25GB RAM, 60GB iTunes library (13,000 tracks). Mediocre 2003 Dell laptop that is slow to startup and cannot play movies very well, but iTunes is fine.

Fast: Mac OSX 10.5.1 Leopard, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16ghz, 2.0GB RAM, 100GB iTunes library (22,000 tracks). iMac C2D (2006).

I suspect that something else is at work in your particular problem.

I have about 52,000 song files, mostly vbr lame files. Artwork is embedded in most files and all are included in my itunes library for transferring to ipod. I also use foobar. Although there may be extremely slight differences in some access speed, I don't notice any when using itunes. There are lots of reasons I like foobar better, but itunes not running fast enough with a large library hasn't been one of them.

EDIT: with all 52,000 files, my itunes systems files have the following sizes:

itunes library.itl - 67,964 kb
itunes library.xml - 76,240 kb

obviously the music files are over 400GB

given your stated size of the itunes library files (in megabites) something odd is going on in your case.

http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=213911 : I have a 1.28 TiB collection of Music 274000+ Tracks of music/speech. This is all gathered in iTunes.

His XML file opposed to yours is a 450 MiB gigigantic file.

Surely something up at your end,

Have you tried defragmenting the drive that contains the library files as well as your media files? May help with load times and other file i/o operations.

Assuming all files are in an accesible place, what result do you get by re-creating your iTunes library?

Drive transfer speeds may also be coming into play - to ask the age-old question, is your drive operating in PIO mode?

You're not dreaming; it seems to me that ITunes has gotten noticeably slower when dealing with my large library since V7. I have about 700GB tunes in maybe 25-30,000 files.

Ripping from CD and Converting audio formats have gotten especially slow. They used to be around 30x speed, now they are 4x or less. Meanwhile, dbpoweramp still smokes along during its conversions, Nero rips and burns are still functioning normally. When I sequence tunes by updating the Track # field, I can type the track # and click "next" faster then ITunes can update the database.

My music drive is fully defragged, as I rewrote all the music files when I copied them to a new external 1TB drive recently. The library remains where it always has, on c:. ITunes was already slow when I copied the files to the new drive. At the same time, I doubled RAM from 768 to 1.5GB. Only a slight performance increase.

I did see something today about turning off Smart Playlist Auto Updating, which I'm going to try. It could be that recreating the library file would solve the problem but I do not know of an easy way to do that.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93313

Apple's procedure to re-create an iTunes library file.

BradPDX: I have a Macbook Pro 2.6ghz with leopard \ XP. Considering iTunes is running on the same machine, OSX is faster. I find it loads faster and it doesn't at all freeze for a microsecond, which I found occurs on XP when opening certain menu items or plugging in my iPod.

Differences in DB size...Could it be that as Apple developed iTunes certain changes were made to result in a more efficient database file? And if one database already exists, its still left as it was the version before it?

Problem solved, on my system.

The culprit was Smart Playlists. For each Smart Playlist, edit it and uncheck the box for Live Updating. The system is now performing normally.

I had about 40 of them, mostly unused. I'll turn them back on as necessary.

And thanks Tanhru for the tip on recreating the database, I may do that anyway.