The current version Android Development Studio (its based on IntelliJ) is even worse, even after applying all the recommended settings. After loading up a Gradle project, building and running (which can take forever), its memory usage shoots up to about 1GB even when idle. My Visual Studio 2013 Solution with 7 Projects (with Resharper) takes just more than half of that under the same conditions.

http://i.imgur.com/bDk4OWJ.png

Now I'm a big fan of aggressive RAM usage, but the problem is Android Dev Studio always seems to want to grab everything it can. Which means that eventually I'm going to need disk swap space and that just causes my machine to slow down tremendously.