Curbing memory usage

Curbing memory usage

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

I moved from bash to zsh because I wanted programmable completion, and
because the FAQ had statements like 

"zsh uses about the same amount of heap memory as bash"
and
"...uses much less memory and CPU time than tcsh."

So I build 3.0.0 --with-zsh-mem on my Solaris 2.4 machine and happily work
away.  This thing has everything!  Unfortunately I notice that while
command-line editing and completion is always snappy, there is a very
noticeable delay between hitting return and, say, /bin/true running.  vmstat
shows huge numbers of page faults, and top shows a 9MB zsh process trying
to swap most of itself back into core.  Wow! That's nearly ten times larger
than any tcsh process on my system.

What is causing this madness?  Here are my options:

# Shell options
setopt Append_History
setopt Auto_List
setopt Auto_Menu
setopt Auto_PushD
setopt Auto_Remove_Slash
setopt noBeep
setopt Correct_All
setopt Extended_Glob
setopt Hist_Ignore_Dups
setopt Hist_Ignore_Space
setopt Hist_No_Store
setopt Ignore_Eof
setopt List_Types
setopt Long_List_Jobs
setopt PushD_Ignore_Dups

I do have 1500 lines of history, but in bash I kept 10000 lines and never
saw memory usage like this.  Are there any tricks to keeping it down?
-- 
      Jason L. Tibbitts III - tibbs@uh.edu - 713/743-8684 - 221SR1
System Manager:  University of Houston High Performance Computing Center
                1994 PC800 "Kuroneko"      DoD# 1723