memory use and reason

[eleman]

[attach]

[Renegade]

That's probably just bloat. I could be wrong, but it's pretty normal for a lot of software to chew up massive bits of memory. (BTW - I'm the resident paranoid conspiracy theorist.) If they are running malware, it's unlikely that you'd ever be able to detect it without some serious network traffic analysis and several lost months of your life.

[rgdot]

Skype can certainly consume that, I have seen it happen. As to why, bloat and probably nothing else.
NSA stuff likely won't show up as a known exe, or even as a component of a known exe. Highly doubt that.

[40hz]

Considering Firefox starts with around that and easily climbs to 3X or more the longer it runs, I wouldn't be too surprised or concerned if you're not concerned about using Skype to begin with.

[eleman]

Considering Firefox starts with around that and easily climbs to 3X or more the longer it runs, I wouldn't be too surprised or concerned if you're not concerned about using Skype to begin with.

Firefox shows things. A small bitmap image of size, say, 400x300 alone would take 480 KB of ram, just to show it. And I don't even mention javascript and other memory hogs.

But skype?
How hard could it be just to provide a chat facility? (at the moment I saw the 160MB memory consumption, there was no audio/video business, just plain old keyboard chat with two friends.)

[cmpm]

I'm at about 70mbs for skype. Maybe try downloading a fresh one and reinstalling.

[jgpaiva]

I'm not sure about the Windows version, but the Mac version does this constantly. I have to routinely kill it, to keep it from taking over the computer (which isn't hard, given that it's a Mac, i.e. a severely underpowered PC ).

[40hz]

But skype?
How hard could it be just to provide a chat facility? (at the moment I saw the 160MB memory consumption, there was no audio/video business, just plain old keyboard chat with two friends.)

Not being a serious coder, I'm the wrong person to ask. But there are enough of them around here that maybe somebody might actually know.  

One thing I've learned from what coding I have done however, has taught me that many times  the answer to questions such as "How hard can it be?" is: "Surprisingly difficult."