Hammer Resource Usage

From Valve Developer Community

The Valve Hammer Editor uses lots of resources when loading models and textures, easily 400-500 megabytes when the full texture browser is loaded. This is not a bug or a "memory leak". Memory usage should plateau after that amount.

Usage of the model and texture browsers are the largest source of increased memory usage. When using these browsers, the application is forced to load a very large amount of raw source content.