My computer's performance is significantly degraded when L5 indexes. That's nothing new. So I can right-click the icon in the system tray and pause it for four hours, and everything is fine, right?
Not really. Performance is still affected with the indexer paused. So I opened my Process Manager to see what was going on. Here's what I see-

Why is the indexer using so much memory when it is paused? (I waited about five minutes after pausing to check this number, just to allow everything to settle down.)
For comparison, I restarted the indexer and let it stabilize. It peaked at about 250,000K and stabilized around 235-

So it is using just under half the memory paused as it uses in operation. That seems strange to me, but I'm no programmer.