I used to use twhirl, for friendfeed/twitter. Leaving it running over night bloated the memory usage to about 450MB. So I stopped using twhirl.
Then I found tweetdeck, a great application for twitter. I managed to leave it running on a system over the weekend. This morning I notice the hard drive working like crazy. Its an old machine with a single core
1.6 1.73 Ghz processor, and 1 GB of Ram. Logging into Windows XP and running task manager (which took a significant amount of time) shows tweetdeck using about 610 MB of memory.
Thats insane!