At the moment FCPX needs all the Ram in the world - just joking
We asked for 64bit FCP and thats what we got 🙂 a ram hungry app! guess we would all be complaining if FCPX didn't use all the Ram we threw at it!
Memory handling is defiantly seems to be an issue either for FCPX and/or Lion in General.
I have 24GB of Ram and after an hour of editing even all of that gets used up. it doesn't always cause a problem for me but when it does FCP becomes very sluggish and can crash.
I tend to quit FCPX wait a few seconds and open it again when it feels sluggish.
i tend to make sure Safari isn't running in the background
I also only have the Events and Projects I'm currently working with available to FCPX and hide the rest to save on Ram. and do an occasional restart.
For general system performance i tend to keep a lot of free space system disk- keeping Media and Projects separate Raid drives. Delete FCPX preferences when appropriate and do a safeboot when things slow down (maybe once a week) this tends to work for me.
I also work often with a Macbook Air with just a paltry 4GB of ram, (editing proxy or full res off either a Promise or Lacie Thunderbolt Raid) which runs ok for general editing (of course the MBA is a poor performer for rendering/export and anything GPU related- it's not recommended for FCP) that 4GB of Ram goes almost instantly but i can still edit and do my work.
Hopefully the memory handling will become much better- keeping enough Ram available for smooth use of the application whilst still using all that maxing-out ram that we buy- and not bringing our systems to their knees by using up all the ram completely.