thanks for confirming I'm not the only one. What's your report number? I don't know how Feedback Assistant correlates similar issues but mine is still reporting "no other similar issues reported"...

thanks, glad (in a way) to see that I'm not the only one. Indeed, cleaning the contacts database (and the container that stores the poster files) and resyncing it has no effect. It would eventually hang again. My investigation also revealed that iCloud keeps on storing poster files for deleted contacts (orphaned posters), iCloud sync downloads those even if those contacts no longer exist. So much for iCloud servers storage space efficiency. Let's hope b3 (hopefully tomorrow) solves this...