For the birds

Pidgin instant messenger at startup:

 6799 peterj    20   0  453m  50m  35m S  0.0  3.4   0:00.66 pidgin

For comparison, Firefox with 110 tabs open:

 6408 peterj    20   0  355m 246m  19m S  0.0 16.4   3:07.25 firefox-bin