I tried setting it to 1000, 10000, and 1000000. It didn’t seem to make any difference in memory usage.
The extra memory from the EGG loader isn’t really an issue for me now with the 3GB patch, and it won’t affect end users who will have BAM files instead.
I’m not sure if my issue with GLSL shaders is related to these changes or not, but otherwise everything seems to be working fine.