> I'm running on an 8GB Linux box without swap and never even come close to running out of memory. If I don't have any VMs running, then it's pretty unusual for me to use much more than 1-2 gigs. It's interesting... one of my colleagues has serious problems with performance because he keeps running out of memory -- and I don't think he's doing anything unusual.

64gb here and 40gb used. Firefox alone uses 2 gigs with a mere ~30 tabs.