Slow performance in iPhoto - library is huge

Hello,
I have a huge number of pix in iPhoto (approx 11k) that I have accumulated of my kids over the last three years. The library is about 9.4 GB.
When I open iPhoto, it imports all the pictures every time. I really cannot have any other application open or everything crawls. Even if I just have iPhoto open, the performance is extraordinarily slow. I have about 12 GB of open memory on my hard drive. I moved the iPhoto library to an external drive, but that didnt seem to help the performance issue.
My questions are these:
1) Can I change a setting to have iPhoto only display / bring into memory the last 100 (or 1000) pictures instead of loading all pix every time?
2) Are there any other settings that would reduce the amount of memory it is using to load the pictures every time?
3) Is there something else that I can do to improve speed or performance?
I do run maintenance applications like Onyx occasionally, but it doesnt seem to have much of an impact on iPhoto performance.
Thanks for any help.
- Bob Mallon

We'll probably have other suggestions after you've answered Terence's questions, but for the moment:
1) No, not in iPhoto 4.x or earlier.
2) No. But you can make it operate faster by reducing the size of your thumbnails in Organize view, if they are now large or largish. At a certain size, which depends on your monitor resolution as well as on how you've set iPhoto's zoom slider, iPhoto switches from using the small thumbnail files that it generates internally to loading the whole original image in order to display a bigger thumbnail of it. That slows things way down. Make your thumbnail images as small as you can stand. On most monitors, at least four thumbnails across the window, and more on many monitors, is necessary to assure that only thumbnail files are loaded at startup. Experiment.
3) Dividing a huge library into several smaller libraries is far and away the best speedup option in iPhoto 4.x and earlier. Unfortunately iPhoto doesn't provide a way to do so while retaining all the original metadata for each picture. You have to export all the images you want to place in a new library, then import them into a newly-created library. You can then designate the library you wish to open each time you launch iPhoto, by holding down the Option key while you launch it.

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