All Your RAM Are Belong to Lightroom

Some more early impressions on Lightroom... One thing I've noticed is that Lightroom is not very efficient with RAM usage (compared to AfterShot anyway). My laptop has 8GB, which I would consider middle of the road in terms of RAM – certainly not loaded, but not paltry either. This laptop doesn't have many processes running in the background either since it's also my audio recording system; I went through and uninstalled or deactivated all the usual junk that ships with a computer. My Lightroom catalog currently has about 9,000 photos, which is well below what I understand to be the performance limits on catalog size.  So last night a 16MP RAW image with somewhat extensive editing got my system page thrashing badly. I tried exiting and restarting Lightroom with the idea that, if it was a memory leak issue, killing the program would free up orphaned RAM. But that particular image still caused excessive page faults after the restart. I am surprised by this because, although RAW images are big, they're pretty small compared to the cumulative size of multi-track audio projects and this system deals with those and hardly raises its pulse. Perhaps the sheer size of audio files forces DAW vendors to be a lot more clever about managing memory. Of course, it's not that simple. For instance, my system is 64-bit which is going to use more memory than a 32-bit system for the same data, and I'm not really factoring that here. In any case, I guess I'm going to need to upgrade to 16GB in the near future. Fortunately RAM is relatively cheap. This laptop has two memory slots, but I'm not sure how many of them are used by the 8GB that's currently installed. Hopefully only one, as it will make the upgrade cheaper.

[Update 3/10/2015 – The factory installed memory on my laptop did in fact only use one slot. So I installed an additional 8GB SODIMM for a total of 16GB. No more page thrashing. Problem solved for $70.]