The y-axis on these graphs are suspect, if not a smoking gun. E.g. memory usage "before" ranged from 0-6GB, and "after" ranged from 0-20GB (!); eyeballing it, "after" might still be lower, but the y-axis shenanigans doesn't give me much confidence.
> Please note that the large spike in the TezEdge v1.15 RAM graph is caused by the update to protocol 011 Hangzhou. This included a major restructuring of the context tree, which is a very expensive operation. While the new representation of the context tree is better, it takes a while to migrate the past version’s tree to the new one.
The difference in range is caused by that spike (the "before" screenshot is from a node that has not reached that point).
Edit: you can also see the actual usage in the tooltip (and before the spike and protocol switch, the memory usage for the TezEdge one was even lower)