- Actually, the CB login itself doesn't use very much memory (here 46 kbytes), but Joomla! 1.0 does, and this is the small drop which makes the cup overflow...

- Joomla recommends minimum 16 Mbyte limit per process when using extensions, and CB holds within it.

- CB's memory usage vs. performance is a constant thought in our design, but CB is a large application in its functionality, as Joomla also.

- Allocating memory in PHP does not always means using it, and the MMU of the server will not assign physical memory until it gets used.

- Memory is made free after each page served, so gets "shared" between "online" users: two examples:

a) A webserver serving 1'000 simultaneous requests serves around 100'000 users online , and would need to run at typically 0.01 seconds per page or less and have about 8 GB of RAM.

b) 1000 users online clicking constantly each 10 seconds and being served in 0.1 seconds need only less than a dozen process, so no real problem there.

- Joomla 1.5 should theretically use less memory, but I didn't check yet.

- PHP memory management is made so that variables stay allocated for reuse, so that second and following calls are quicker. This explains partially the relatively large amounts used.

- My test server runs typically with 8 Mbytes memory limit, so I see if a memory allocation gets out of control during my tests.

Hope this explains a few things.

There is more on that subject on www.php.net