CPU/memory usage of AIR application under Mac 10.4.10

Question

As my AIR application uses a lot of CPU/memory under Mac
(seems better in Windows), I decide to do some basic testing. I
create several applications with different level of complexities.
Below is a table of CPU/memory usage when the application is simply
sitting there. A brief description of the application can be found
in the end of each line.
Here are some results:
[1] Even for an empty application, CPU usage is not zero
(most non-AIR application has 0 CPU usage when doing nothing). Also
the memory usage is huge, comparable to Finder on my computer.
[2] Empty application has 7 threads running.
[3] Indetermined progress bar costs a lot of CPU; and I guess
any other animation costs a lot of CPU too. But if they are
invisible they are fine.
[4] running timer costs CPU.
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE
VSIZE application
10093 adl 1.8% 0:01.85 7 100 292 15.0M 13.8M+ 22.8M 444M
empty
10094 adl 1.9% 0:01.55 7 100 299 15.2M 14.0M+ 23.1M 444M
label
10097 adl 1.9% 0:01.48 7 100 302 15.3M 13.4M 23.7M 445M
progress bar
10095 adl 5.7% 0:02.40 7 100 302 15.4M- 13.2M 23.5M 445M
progress bar (indetermined)
10125 adl 15.9% 0:03.66 7 100 304 15.7M- 13.4M 23.9M 445M 5
progress bar (indetermined)
10126 adl 29.7% 0:10.39 7 100 325 16.7M+ 13.4M+ 24.9M+ 445M
10 progress bar (indetermined)
10128 adl 1.9% 0:01.34 7 100 324 16.1M 13.7M 24.3M 445M 10
progress bar (indetermined), visible=false
10136 adl 1.8% 0:00.76 7 100 323 16.5M+ 13.9M+ 24.7M- 450M
Empty datagrid
10147 adl 1.9% 0:01.60 7 101 328 16.1M 13.8M+ 24.5M- 447M
TabNavigator with two empty VBox children
10138 adl 1.8% 0:01.59 7 100 372 19.4M 13.9M 27.7M 453M
datagrid with 10000 simple rows
10131 adl 3.1% 0:02.38 7 110 348 25.7M 19.3M 34.8M 458M 10
Empty native windows
10143 adl 1.9% 0:00.99 7 100 296 15.1M 13.9M+ 23.2M- 444M
Timer, delay = 100ms, calling an empty function
10145 adl 4.1% 0:02.35 7 100 298 15.0M 14.0M+ 23.2M- 444M
Timer, delay = 100ms, calling function update label position
As to my own application, it's much bigger than these simple
ones. The CPU usually stablizes to 20% and VSIZE is about 1G. There
is no timer running. When I leave the application open for a few
hours, the application will eventually freeze and I have to kill
it.
I am wondering if there are any articles or documents
explaining AIR's CPU/memory usage. And also if AIR is planning to
improve the performance in the next release.

Answer 1

James, thank you for the very fast answer! I did various tests on the weekend on my computer and computer of my friend.
And I can say, that Debug flag doesn't affect memory consumption.   They still eat memory. My steps to reproduce are as follows:
(Windows 7 32 bit)
Photoshop CS5:
1) set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\CSXS2Preferences\PlayerDebugMode to 0
2*) check HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\CSXS2Preferences (just in case)
3) Compile HelloPhotoshop example to ZXP and install via  Extension manager
4) restart computer
5) Run Photoshop CS5 - Memory consumption: 100 096 KB
6) Open HelloPhotoshop and close it 10 times
7) Memory consumption: 155 840 - 5,574 MB per one close/open
Maybe a garbage collector is expected to run and free this memory, but it never happened in my case. The memory pool was increasing to 1 GB when I was working with one of my panels - with no documents open in Photoshop
In InDesign I tried the same thing with HelloInDesign ( I had to close the panel completely and then open with Window | Extensions | HelloInDesign)
Memory consumption on start: 118 516
Memory consumption after 10 open/close cycles: 197 516
It's 7,9 MB per one close/open
It's the simpliest panel test. When I'm using AIR libraries the memory usage is increasing a lot faster.