how much RAM does Ubuntu need to sleep?

Wed Jul 5 16:20:46 UTC 2006

When I return to my desktop after a period of inactivity, the system is
really slow.  When I open top in a terminal, this is what I find...

 7691 john      15   0 1403m 789m 4492 S 36.6 78.1 578:16.89 python
 7633 root      15   0 56480  38m 3440 S  2.7  3.8  29:28.18 firestarter
 6953 root      15   0  149m  15m 5396 S  2.3  1.5 478:20.54 Xorg

I've been monitoring this over the last few days, and python is always
the culprit. Does anyone know why python would need that much resource
in order for the system to "sleep" ?