Application crashes when optimizing catalog

I am running LrC on a MacBook Pro working on a 870 Gb catalog on a SSD. My laptop hybrid drive has limited space right now and I just came back from a trip with 12,000+ photos and am trying to culling them down while still running off the SSD. The photos are from 3 separate Nikon bodies, two Z8s and a Z7II.

When I try to close the application I have preferences set to backup, optimize and check integrity. The first time I had LrC application backup my working catalog to a Thunderbolt 5 SSD (laptop is running Thunderbolt 4) separate from the Thunderbolt 5 SSD where my catalog is stored it took 19 hours at which point the application crashed. So as a work around I don’t have the application backup the catalog. At the end of each working day I copy the now entire 870-ish Gb catalog folder from one Thunderbolt drive to that separate Thunderbolt drive which takes 6 minutes. Then I open and check the integrity of the .lrcat file on each drive, never any problems. After I delete a significant number of images (roughly 1000) I figure it’s a good idea to optimize the catalog which I try to accomplish after the I complete the work around backup. The application crashes in the middle of the optimization each time I try to run it. First I get the macOS spinning wheel of WAIT after about 1-3 minutes into the optimization, then LrC crashes and macOS pops up the “Problem Report for Lightroom Classic” box with a bunch of information and a comment section for me. Over time I’ve tried optimizing the catalog off each of the SSDs with the same result, the application crashes. 

I’m running macOS 26.5 on a 2023 14” MacBook Pro M2 Max with 64 Gb of RAM and a 2 Tb Hybrid Drive.

I intentionally shut down all other applications other than Loupedeck while working on this catalog since I have been having these problems, but it has had no effect.

I’m running LrC version 15.3 which installed 19 days ago along with Camera Raw version 18.3.1. I have 56 Gb of my 64 Gb of physical laptop RAM setup in LrC for the Camera Raw Cache Setting which is also why I shut all other software down. The cache file is stored on my laptop’s hybrid drive.

I’ve attached a screen shot of the contents of the 2 SSDs, Drive 1 is the working drive (you can see the .rcat.lock file still there from the latest crash). Drive 2 is the backup SSD.

I’ve also attached a screenshot of the basic information from the macOS Problem Report.