Lightroom now runs pretty fast.. but when your library is filled with 10,000 images/references, will it still be as fast? The Beta versions fail for me because it simply hogged system resources. Same with Aperture which was why I stuck to c1pro. But the new LR seems smoother and has more refinements and control to highlight and shadow controls. Noise control and sharpening isnt as good as c1pro but its acceptable since I run my images thru noise control batch processing anyway.
Am running dual core 2ghz g5 with 7gb ram btw..
i have about 8000 pics in my libarary and it works just fine. The only downtime you have is when you build 1:1 previews of a 200+ shot... that will take some time but its way faster now than before. the betaversion would use up all the memory i had for this operation, LR1 does it now with a third of the resources... i think best is when you import a new shoot to let the computer run by itself for a couple minutes, go have a coffee and come back afterwards. Also previews are discarded after a certain time (can be adjusted by user, default is 30days). so if you revisit a shot taken a year ago you will have to rebuilt the 1:1 previews.