Hi Tjark,
I can share my experience, lets see if it helps.
- It is not just list, probably the amount of records being processed in memory could also increase the memory consumption. May be try to end your transaction and begin a new one by processing the objects in batches
- I have seen people, developing MF logic with list operations to avoid DB Calls. It is not like DB calls are always bad and List operations are always good. But there should be some balance. (This i am saying with my Java experience)
- If you want to understand how much memory is consumed per MF or per MF action, you can write Java actions which will return the memory consumption. Refer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4802651/memory-usage-for-a-specific-list-of-object.
- If we have the Java action, then it can be called before and after the activity or at the start and end of the MF to understand the memory consumption. See below