high memory usage in KDE?

[nick phillips <np@f-matic.net>]

hello list,

i'm running debian 3.0 and KDE 2.2 on a PII 366 toshiba laptop with 128 mb
ram. i'm mainly concerned with running audio applications in linux, so
memory usage is pretty important to me in dealing with large samples being
loaded into memory and so on. i'm a little concerned about KDE's memory
usage at the moment. when i boot into KDE, with no applications running, and
issue the 'top' command, it shows about 95MB used, with 35 MB available.
this strikes me as very high - i'm a mac person, and my powerbook boots up
Mac OS 9 using only 35 mb ram, so i'm surprised KDE takes so much memory.
when i open up a few applications, pretty quickly KDE starts drawing on swap
space, which seems to cause some slowdowns and glitches in some audio
programs.

so, my question is: is this an ordinary amount of memory for KDE to use? are
there any ways to decrease memory usage so i can minimize using swap space?
or should i think about switching to GNOME or another window manager? i like
KDE a lot - i would just like it to use less memory!

one last thing - one process in particular seems to take the most memory,
which is kdeinit. using 'top', i see about ten instances of kdeinit, each
using about 5-8% memory. i assume this is part of the kde desktop, but
should there be so many instances of it?

thanks in advance for all your help!

best,
nick