ITunes 11 (Mac) is an incredible memory hog

Question

Look at this! iTunes takes 19GB of virtual memory, 2.6GB resident. It takes half an hour just to QUIT the program. The entire system crawls even if iTunes isn't doing anything. What on earth could be the matter here?
System: mid-2007 iMac, 4GB memory, OS X 10.8.2.
$ ps axguww| egrep iTun\|CPU
USER              PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
matt              300   1.0 63.6 19329580 2669520   ??  R    Wed09PM 114:14.67 /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes -psn_0_45067
matt              406   0.0  0.0  2466140    792   ??  S    Wed09PM   0:00.87 /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesH elper -psn_0_110619
matt            41216   0.0  0.0  2432768    588 s003  R+   10:16PM   0:00.00 egrep iTun|CPU

Answer 1

Matt,
I don't have the solution, but wanted to commiserate with someone with a similar issue. I have a similar iMac with the same RAM and am now up to OS X 10.8.3 with iTunes 11.0.2. I don't have an issue with iTunes under non-web-based operations, it plays music fine and syncs with devices without much problem. Where I have the problem similar to yours is when I am searching the iTunes Store.
Say I'm looking for a certain song. I do the search and click on "See All" for the songs on the results page showing everything that is sold. I could get a list of over a thousand versions or related songs. As I begin to scroll down this list with the added thumbnail of the album cover (in iTunes 11), I get to about item 100 and iTunes starts to bog down and get slower and slower. When I go to Activity Monitor to see what's going on iTunes is scooping up all the CPU and keeps chewing away at real and virtual memory. It gets slower and slower until it does become unusable as other have said. At this point it's taken up about 2 GB of real memory and an equal or larger portion of virtual memory and this is reflected over the rest of the computer and other apps (and I'm not running much else concurrently!) as all real memory is about gone. I never had this issue with iTunes 10, I never noticed any slow downs during many store searches. So do we have to put up with this super lag due to the album thumbnails? If so just give me the option to shut them off and search on a more responsive basis - as I am trying to buy something. I'm hoping future updates will get iTunes 11 in line.
I give you credit for waiting for iTunes to take its time to quit, as I usually give it the "Force Quit" and try again.