Upper limits of iTunes library?

I have a very large music collection -- roughly estimated at over 2,500 cds. I have spent years working (off and on) on digitizing it, and although I don't really know exactly what percentage of it I've managed to digitize, I have about 150 gigs of hard drive space filled (and backed up to a second drive on another computer).
On the computer that I dock my iPod with, I have iTunes loaded with virtually everything I have on my hard drive. That's about 25,000 songs. This is my gaming computer, it's an older Athlon 64 with about 1.5 gig memory.
My experience is that iTunes runs very poorly with such a large library -- it takes time to load, it takes time to save the library when I close it down, and it's very sluggish while using it. It frequently pauses for up to 5-7 seconds while it "thinks" about something or other, making it a little frustrating to work with. I can't really use it to play music with because it will freeze halfway through a song and skip for 5-7 seconds while it tries to get its thoughts together. However, I run iTunes on my other computer (where it's loaded with only a thousand or so songs) when I want to listen to music while gaming -- the overloaded iTunes on my gaming computer is largely used just to dock my iPod with.
I guess my question is... does anyone else overload their iTunes library like this, and how do they handle it? I assume more memory would help, but I also kind of assume iTunes wasn't really designed to keep track of such a large library. I've also been told that some people use other programs to deal with such a large music library, but since I don't really know much about what might work better, I thought I'd start here.

Why don't you create multiple iTunes libraries? You could separate them by genres. All you have to do then, is hold down your Option key when launching iTunes and select the library/genre you want to listen to.
-Bmer
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