I posted this as I was making one catalog as opposed to a catalog per client. I was strongly encouraged by most users to do this. I approached it in a two step process.
First I made a new catalog file. Then imported half of the images into it. At this point I was at 176K+ images. It was still running rather smoothly. Then I wanted to import a couple more and at this point I thought I better import the split multiple catalogs in order for me to have all the processing instructions for the images. At this point I had 187K+ images and on one of the imports the process of importing that catalog didn't complete. It just stayed in the same state for hours, and hours.
So I ended up terminating that process and reboot and try again. After a couple attempts of it hanging in the same area I stopped it again. I needed to jump back in and work, on some of the latest images, and noticed a rather long delay for the main image to fill up the Dev screen(or Library screen). The thumbs populated, but a bit randomly as I scrolled over them, they appeared. At first nothing appeared to show up when selecting different images. Then I guess after some lengthy background processing they started to appear. This was at the end of day and I didn't really work the file much, but things looked OK. I will be working on this catalog today. But wanted to ask and share to see if others had such behavior and particularly some thoughts on the one catalog that didn't complete the import. Should have I let it try and import overnight? I even set the process priority to a High level in the Task Manager.
FYI: I'm running...
Intel Corei7 860, ~3.2Mhz QuadCore on Asus P7P55DPro
x64Bit Windows7
16GB ram
256GB SSD Crucial M
64GB System memory (Patriot Torqx)
64gb Swap for Photoshop (Patriot Torqx)
Gigabit LAN on 50-60MBS network on a number of servers.
nVidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card/ Total available 4096MB, Dedicated vid mem 1024MB, System vid is zero memory, Shared Sys memory is 3072MB
2 screens @ 2560x1600