Google Wave, trying to render a big wave

I was trying to read a random Wave that had 129 other users and 340+ wavelets, and it SMASHED my work laptop, which is fairly decent (Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM), so that I couldn’t even really read the Wave — it was too slow to respond.

Windows Task Manager while trying to use Google Wave

I am using the Firefox 3.5.4 beta but it was unusable in Google’s own Chrome, as well. Firefox actually seemed better as it would allocate memory and then release it but Chrome would just eat more and more memory until the machine was paging like crazy. Check out my Task Manager screenshot above, you can see the memory going up and down and one of the CPU cores maxed out.

I’m keen to keep trying Wave out, but is Google doing a Microsoft (see Wirth’s Law), and just expecting that as Wave catches on, everyone will have enough horsepower to run it? Or is it just that it’s beta, and performance will get better with optimisation — including Javascript engine optimisations in the major browsers? I guess we’ll see…