No, there are not 17 000 albums at top level.
There are 6000 or so albums altogether - in the top level there are about 27 albums - with 6000 further albums below them - down to about 3 or 4 levels below.
The Admin album first level page is not a problem, it snaps up with no delay - it has no 'move' option on it.
But any album below that, when you call it up under Admin, goes through the whole database to provide the options for the 'move' option menu and from takes about 10 seconds for anything to appear and about 14 seconds for the page to complete loading.
If you look at the 'view page source' you find that all the menu options for the 'move' or 'copy' option have been calculated and printed to the html page, making a total of about 7000 lines of html for that page.
And the more albums you have, the slower any of the Admin album pages below the top level are going to load.
The page/form I am referring to is the Edit Album: page for a single album, not the listing of albums or subalbums although those are pretty slow too.
Thanks,
Richard