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Generating the transaction does seem to be very resource intensive!

"On a quad-core benchmark server, generating a private transaction consumes ~3.2 GB of memory and ~50 seconds of compute time. On a 32-core Amazon EC2 server, compute time is around ~30 seconds."

*These figures have changed during development.

That's for creating a transaction. Validating / verifying a transaction takes milliseconds, which is important for the consensus algorithms to work properly.

Transaction verification is identical to Bitcoin, modulo joinsplit verification (which is benchmarked at ~0.035 seconds on a Intel quad-core Xeon E3-1225 v2 3.2GHz).

Verification takes sub 10ms.