Look at this dump from the system monitor on my box at work:
This box has a staggering 4gb of memory, and half of it is listed as occupied, and I’m not running any applications of my own. I mean honestly, a clock applet requiring 119 megabytes? The mixer, 133 megabytes? The panel, 135 megabytes?
What the heck is going on here?
I’d guess that application is including the shared memory taken up by the gnome libraries in each of those numbers. After all, it does claim less total memory use (932 Mb) than the sum of the values on the list. Use something like memstat to get a clearer idea of how much private memory each application is using, or better still gmemusage.