and that is just idle. No idea what its doing, but add it to a pool and have people mining into it, and it'll be 4x-5x more CPU.
The 15 second block time probably doesn't help with resources. Out of the 58 coin wallets I currently have running, KGC has the most blocks (over 2 million - more than double the next highest) and ranks third in overall RAM usage (532MB), and first in resident RAM usage (495MB). Could just be that the db is growing too large and getting out of hand.
Perhaps a redo from source which uses leveldb, and a change to block time (double period) could do the trick. If not, it's only going to get worse.
sounds plausible. fastcoin behaves in a similar fashion and has fast block times and a huge blockchain. I would think changes as you suggest would help if someone was able to do a hardfork and if it would survive it.