Why are memory requirements so high?

[Dave Camp]

I apologize in advance if this gets double posted. I had a mail glitch
yesterday...

Recently I tried to check in a 1.7 meg binary file to our CVS repository,
which only yielded a message back from the server indicating it was out of
memory.

After searching the list archives, we changed the VM swap ulimit for CVS to
something beyond the default 33 Meg limit it had, and things started working
again.

Why in the world does CVS need more than 33 megs to check in a 1.7 meg
binary file? That concerns my IS guy to no end...

Thanks,
Dave