some processes having large memory footprints

[Richard Wohlstadter <rwohlsta@watson.wustl.edu>]

Hello all,

I'm new with the AMD64 debian port and had some questions I'm hoping 
someone out there can answer for me.  One thing I noticed after 
installing the AMD64 port on our opterons is that some processes seem to 
have very large memory footprints on the system.  For example, sshd 
instances are taking 26m virtual, bash taking 8m, ntpd taking 11m.  Does 
this have to do with how these binaries are allocating their data 
structures and since I'm pure 64 bit they suck up more memory?  Just 
seems like alot of waste(although resident memory usage is more in line 
with what 32bit machines use).  Thanks for any input anyone can share 
regarding this.

Rich