I have years of collected music - about 4 TB - on a NAS, the tags for which were incomplete, corrupt or non-existent. Four or five days ago I started Picard (v 2.1.2) working on these files. I was waiting for it to finish to begin clustering the unclustered files. This morning I find that Picard had shut down. When I opened it again of course both panes were empty. Obviously I didn’t get to save the completed files. I followed instructions on the Quick Start page. I’m running Pop OS! and find no logs anywhere.
What happened?
You probably overloaded it with too many files. Start in small batches and work your way up. Picard isn’t designed to be fully automatic.
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i find you can run at least 10000 on a good computer but if you try adding any thing near 100000 it will always crash some times it wont strait away but eventually it will
IT never occurred to me there might be some limit. Thanks. Time to start again.
yer when i first stated i thort the same thing. reamber 10000 is a guide only you may be able to run more or you may not be able to even run that much
Do you think 10,000 would be too much for an FX8350 8 core proc?
Edit: One too many zeros
should be ok. im running a 2019 imac full spec so it and it is not even making the fans spin up its more
the older cpus that may have a hard time
Does the Quick Start page not include the knowledge (common to any experienced user) that smaller batches are highly preferable?
I think 10.000 would be too many for a human brain. 
As @Billy_Yank said, Picard is not an automated solution. You should verify all of Picard’s lookups manually. This is likely not doable if you load ~1.000 releases in one go…
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The Quick Start article only contains this, AFAICT:
You should note - Picard is not built to be a mass single-track tag fixer. Picard believes in quality over quantity and provides a plethora of customizations to tweak music collections to your needs.
It could probably do with a more explicit comment about this. (I also couldn’t find anything in any other Picard documentation pages.) Patches welcome. 
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I would start with a copy of one album. Then copies of a few at once.
Picard has the ability to permanently overwrite, rename and move data and files and I would be very careful! Then once you’re comfortable you can set it loose
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@kneedeep Here is a post which could be helpful. File renaming question: large number of files
One of the major problems in the past with large lookups has been with searching for cover art which takes a lot of time. 
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