One my main computer (not the Tormach) I just recently noticed that the dropbox application has past chrome for top memory usage (273 Megs) Even though I haven't moved anything through it in a few weeks
From their website
What factors cause high memory (RAM) usage?
There are several factors that can cause higher than expected memory (RAM) usage, including the number of files stored in your Dropbox folder. The more files you have in your Dropbox folder, the more memory Dropbox will need to keep track of them.
I've got 247 actual files, about 31 megs total in the dropbox and it's using over a 1/4 Gig of ram to look after it.....
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I shut down dropbox on my main pc's when I'm not using it . It's too much of a pig . Even with selective sync it's still the highest resource muncher on my workstations . Adrive would have been a far better choice
A lot of the "memory used" reports are somewhat uncertain, because there's a lot of code that needs to be "ready" in case it's needed, and thus is pre-loaded. As long as it's not used, it doesn't actually take up any real resources from your computer. Just talking to the Windows OS may require loading 100 MB of code... but if the program doesn't use most of that code, it's not actually "hogging" anything. If something needs to use that memory for real, the memory will go that that use, and if your program later actually needs the pre-loaded code, it will re-load it, which will take a little longer, but at least it'll still work.
I'm sure there might be a fair number of inefficiencies in the Dropbox client, just like in any large piece of software. But trying to judge programs simply by "how much memory does the process manager say it uses" is unfortunately not a particularly precise way of measuring.
273 MB isn't all that much in modern systems, unfortunately. When Dropbox talks about "more files means more memory used to manage them," they're talking about the per-file overhead, but there's also a "startup overhead," even if you only have one file, and I think 250 MB might be just that. There's a reason laptops now come with 32 GB of RAM...