That’s not normal.
What plugins do you have installed? Maybe one is slowing it down?
And perhaps run “clear caches / restart” just in case there’s cache corruption
I run it fine on a Linux machine that has 4GB ram total — I’m curious how much memory you’re talking about.
I don't have the same experience, PyCharm is absolutely killing my machine and I always have it in Power Save mode. Sure, it isn't eating 8GB but that is because the JVM by default doesn't have that much available. I had to raise the memory limit considerably to be able to open my projects without it hanging.