Slowdown after removing many spots and I have to restart

I tend to agree: a few spots are fine to ‘remove’ singly in this parametric way within Lr Classic. But for addressing a very large number of spots one at a time, the pixel based tools (non-parametric) available in Photoshop will be more efficient and appropriate. That needs to be planned to happen at the most advantageous and least limiting moment in the overall workflow between LrC and PS. 

There is an AI-assisted Dust Removal tool (though I cannot yet comment on this from experience): I believe this assists with spot detection and placement, but assuming the resulting spot removals are still of the same nature, I suppose that the same ‘processing complexity’ issue would remain.

When scanning slides and negatives, I have to remove a lot of dust particles. The LR cache then fills up. When I forgot to close and restart LR, LR took up 51GB of memory and my Mac Studio (M1 ultra 64GB 1TB) crashed.

This bug occurs every time I remove (many) spots with the remove tool. Basic, no AI. See screenshot. After a few of these negatives, LR slows down and eventually stops (and other programs too).

LrC is not designed to remove large numbers of spots. It uses parametric editing, and every spot you remove is recorded as text in the catalog, which will cause slowdowns with a large number of spots.

Removing dust from scanned images is done much more easily and quickly in Photoshop, which works directly with image pixels. The Spot healing brush tool and the Clone stamp will do what you want.

When you create a new post, the first text box is intended for a short title, and you then describe the problem in detail in the next text box.
This is unfortunately not clearly described on the New post page – this new forum is poorly designed.