memory consumption problem as collections get bigger

[Robby Stephenson]

On Wednesday 29 October 2008, Doruk Fisek wrote:
> Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:23:59 -0700, Robby Stephenson
>
> <robby at periapsis.org> :
> > A 16 MB XML text file is pretty huge. How many entries?
>
> ~9000 albums.
>
> I'm not saying it's small but even if you load the whole 16 MB file to
> RAM, why does it take up so much space?

Certainly a valid question. I'll poke at it some. There's overhead with the 
data structures, but a 10x+ memory usage is way excessive.

Robby