Time Machine, you're on probation.

I was so excited to plug in my 500GB USB2 ext HDD for Time Machine.

Sure enough Leopard recognized it and asked me if I wanted to use it as a backup drive. YES PLEASE

Then I wanted to add my home folder because that's all I'm interested in backing up... but it doesn't work like that. You can only exclude (a lot of) directories instead. What a hassle.

Then the backup starts. Backup is using 400MB real ram and about 400 virtual. mds well over 100MB. I can't afford this! Almost a GB of ram used for backing up my home folder...
After the backup is done, the processes do not release. I have to manually stop them as root. This is not acceptable in my opinion.

Hopefully the smaller incremental backups take up a lot less going forward. I am definitely going to keep my eye on this one. If it doesn't improve over time I'll probably use a different backup solution.

Has anyone else noticed crazy high ram usage by TM?

Quite strange.... I always had a normal usage on my macbook... no spikes on processor or RAM.. Incremental was pretty fast and without any noticable usage

Likewise, I have never seen any performance issues with Time Machine. Have you checked other forums or google'd it.

No I haven't. And it looks like the incremental go unnoticed. The backup process hasn't popped back up in my activity monitor. Maybe that is just something that runs the first time, or when you fiddle with the exclude rules.

How full is your internal HD? When mine was almost full, my real RAM usage was much higher than it was after I added HD space. This may require time machine to use more real RAM since it has nowhere else to go. Just an idea, since I'm not sure how time machine works.