@panyuz: How many items are in your library, what is the memory usage at startup, and what exactly do you have to do to get the memory usage to 1.2 GB?
@dstillman There are 672 entries in the literature library and zotero.sqlite is 75.9MB. Zotero's memory useage is 450MB at startup and 987MB when opened 4 tabs (journal articles, within 50 pages).
PDF file size doesn't mean anything, actually. Some PDFs (usually the scanned ones) use very high ratio compression and can easily use hundreds of megabytes of memory to display images. But whether this is the issue in this case, I'm not sure, until the specific PDFs are tested.
Does the memory usage is high with all PDFs or only with some of them?
Upgrade Storage
The latest beta, open 4 tabs, and the biggest pdf with 647 pages(48.7MB), which is a linked pdf. take almost 1.2G RAM.
I think the performance of zotero could be further improved
https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApM4alTvtmnrhYYh4_OtckxNf9OfqA?e=6ePrfo
startup:https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApM4alTvtmnrhYYkoutRkAFo7GETaw?e=ZH4iyk
open 4tabs:https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApM4alTvtmnrhYYiKXbUTwitePkUbg?e=HAFdtm
After continuing to open 2 books (file 1 is 48.7MB, 524 pages; file 2 is 1.4MB, 102 pages) , the memory usage rose to 1.7G
open 2 books(6 tabs): https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApM4alTvtmnrhYYjpoWDrYln6V9tSg?e=toaT2J
Does the memory usage is high with all PDFs or only with some of them?