Thanks for your interest.
I will answer all of your questions in a moment but first let me say that I think I may of confused two issues and see what I can do to clarify here.
First, the libraries (usually loaded via iPhoto) is usually extremely slow to load (vs other programs) and response time to trying to do stuff is very sluggish. My initiative was to basically give up iPhoto in favor of Aperture going foward but impediments have included the fact that other programs default to iPhoto such as scanning and downloads. I actually recombined my broken libraries into a single with great enthusiasm when the two library formats were effectively brought together as one. And once the program (iPhoto) is up, I am mentally comfortable to stay and use what has been familiar (it would be easier to transition if Apple had a setting to have all programs treat iPhoto preferences as Aperture instead). On top of that, with Aperture's different method of organizing, I want to again make my system run as friendly and expansive (e.g., access to/compatible) with my iDevices and ATV, etc. These are the crux of my issues.
Now to the crashing I threw in and confused the primary issue...so, I have a noticed over the course of the past couple of years (perhaps longer) that upon returning, my computer screen would be dark and simply not respond to mouse or keyboard input. I can not recall ever working on my computer and it simply going black and not responding, rather it would appear to someone that it was having trouble coming out of sleep or something. Pressing and holding the power button is the only thing that now works...before (maybe under 10.8), I would have to physically unplug the machine. The challenge is that I have tried to isolate when this happens. First, it happened a few times a week under 10.8.x (probably 10.7, too) and sometimes multiple times a day. It usually occurred after I had been away for some time or over night. Other times, I might be away for 30-90 minutes and find I was frozen out as described. However, I would sometimes go a couple of weeks without an incident. The correlation seemed to be iPhoto. I tried to make sure I closed it when I was done, keep it closed and then it would still happen hours or days later. It wasn't a perfect correlation 'cause it seemed to also happen if I hadn't used photo app. Despite all the updates, the problem persists.
I spoke with the Apple Geniuses and they were sure I had to rebuild or reinstall the OS and NOT do a TM restore. That sounded painful and fraught with unintentional consequences. I figured I'd simply wait for Maverick. The problems continue. I don't know if the trouble is inate to these photo systems (which it seems it should not be) or if I really do need a rebuild. Meantime, everyone likes to bash library sizes which I always felt was a bit "lazy" but maybe not.
I was at the Apple Store last month for an unrelated issue and overheard someone complaining about slow response, tough to manage, etc., and the Apple employee said the person needed to split librarys or buy a Mac Pro (ha) for the better computing power. He "laughed" at the 20k-30k file concept as being a bad way to manage. Is it wrong to want this to work like their commercials and fairly consistent to how people really work?
So, let's see what info I still need to answer:
* OSX 10.9.1; iPhoto 9.5.1; Aperture 3.5.1 (as you can discern from above, I have generally kept these programs up to date).
* Computer:
Model Identifier: iMac10,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 3.06 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 16 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: IM101.00CC.B00
* 322 GB available of a 1 TB HD. The library is 88 GB
* No plug-ins.
So, lots of detail here. I hope I have stimulated yours or someone else's thoughts.