Size of application is huge

["Andersen, Jan" <jandersen informatica com>]

I have made a simple (simplish) application: it reads a configuration and based on this it creates an 
information display. The information is organized thus: 

- The toplevel is a notebook with a number of tabs. 
- Each tab contains another notebook with a number of tabs
- Each tab in those notebooks contains a GtkTreeView displaying a GtkListStore with up to <100 lines of text.

The toplevel notebook typically has 8 pages and each second level notebook has 4 pages.what shocks me is the 
fact that it uses about 318MB from start. Another problem is that after several hours of use it will 
sometimes allocate everything in the machine (up to 1.5GB - all real and virtual storage), then it will dump 
it all as a core file.

Is it reasonable that this construction uses 318MB?

The other problem is probably because I do something wildly stupid somewhere, I'll catch that eventually, but 
if GNOME is that wasteful with its memory, I'd better find another tool.

/jan