iTunes 11 (Mac) is an incredible memory hog
Look at this! iTunes takes 19GB of virtual memory, 2.6GB resident. It takes half an hour just to QUIT the program. The entire system crawls even if iTunes isn't doing anything. What on earth could be the matter here?
System: mid-2007 iMac, 4GB memory, OS X 10.8.2.
$ ps axguww| egrep iTun\|CPU
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
matt 300 1.0 63.6 19329580 2669520 ?? R Wed09PM 114:14.67 /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes -psn_0_45067
matt 406 0.0 0.0 2466140 792 ?? S Wed09PM 0:00.87 /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesH elper -psn_0_110619
matt 41216 0.0 0.0 2432768 588 s003 R+ 10:16PM 0:00.00 egrep iTun|CPU
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), 24", mid-2007, 4GB