To add to the comments about SQL analyze timing, mine (on a 660,000 image catalogue after a reboot to make sure there were no stray processes running) took 1284 seconds (over 21 minutes) on a fast Windows 10 system with the catalogue and cache on a fast internal SSD.
That is an astonishingly long time.
I just ran another test, this time using a customer's 800K item catalog instead of my 1M item test catalog, and got analyze times of:
- 63 seconds (fast SSD)
- 134 seconds (external USB drive)
I'm not sure what would account for such a discrepancy between the timings on your system vs. mine.
Puzzling.