[tlinton]

V8 has an odd habit of not releasing memory back to the OS after mark-and-sweeps. It's a minor performance boost to let it roll up memory and it isn't uncommon for it to hog up as much memory until a heuristic (or an OS signal) tells it to knock it off.

[ashark]

Apparently "hey, I'm trying to use this 4GB machine for actual work with a couple VMs running and you're driving me in to swap hell" didn't come through as "knock it off".

And that's the story of why I have an 8GB machine now :-/