Lightrooom Catalog Folders

Ok- I didn't notice until just recently, while doing a schedulated malwayre/virus scan, that it was taking FOREVER for it to scan through the lightroom folders (\mydocs\Lightroom\...). so, I viewed the folder properties and to my shock the tally came to something like 53k files in 13k folders or some crap like that, totalled over 2gigs. Now, ever once it a while it'll do a catalog backup to my external drive, so I've got several folders just like that. I'm assuming I can delete all of the old backups to save space, but is this just how lightroom is? The fly in the ointment?

BTW- My lr catalog consists of around 52k photos on an external drive...

BM

Yes, Lightroom represents its Previews as a large number of individual files on the disk.
I delete all but the most recent two backups.
I hadn't looked recently, today my catalog is on the local hard disk and the 300000 images are on the house NAS (not in the catalog).
Lightroom Catalog.lrcat is 2.18GB on local disk E: - that's tiny, the Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata folder is 465GB in 628967 folders and 208584 files !

Wow, that's a lot of images, fellows....... But I haven't counted my own lately. I still have a lot of slides I need to scan in too.