It appears after some experimentation that this 30% memory bloat is due to the need to impose an external 16-byte alignment on top of the system malloc library. If we go back to an alternative malloc library that can provide 16-byte alignment natively, this waste goes away. I’ll run a few more tests to confirm this, then commit this change.
jean-claude’s advice is good, though. Also, you might consider distributing your game to end-users with your egg files already prebuilt to bams, to avoid this potential problem in general (the egg loader was never intended to be particularly memory-efficient; it was primarily designed for the developer, not the end user).
David