I opened the new ticket.
http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/ticket/2884
It's funny that hannah's error is like mine and I also have a large db.
I had a question about speeding up the adding of books. I assume that much of the slowdown comes from calibre trying to read the metadata written in the pdf etc. files. However, since my files are named by ISBN there is no reason for calibre to read the metadata since it can get it later using the ISBN.
So I was wondering if it would be possible to add a functionality where you can turn off calibre's reading of the metadata from the files when adding and perhaps it'll speed it up?
Thanks for the updates,
M