Just reporting the bug here so everyone knows about it and recieves a status update when and if it gets fixed.
I've created a ticket:
https://bt.x-cart.com/view.php?id=43860
Everyone knows I love X-cart 5. Because I love it, I have to point out its bugs sometimes. The slowness overall is still alarming, but the slowness in admin with a large catalog is the worst problem to date. With a large amount of categories and products, X-cart 5 admin slows to a crawl. One example of this is emphasized in this write up about the issue in my blog tonight. (scroll down to the first video) :
http://xcartguru.com/its-friday-and-the-code-is-good/
This needs to be addressed. I have several clients that have come from an X-cart 4 background, that are appalled at the performance. I am not just complaining, I'm ready to help. We have to address this performance issue ASAP.
The initial discussion about XC being slow in general is here:
http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=69944 This thread needs to be reawakened and discussed desperately. (Tony, I think you were on vacay, we missed you in that thread.)