Unexpectly high memory usage with certain import settings

[ScanMountGoat]

Adding unapplied modifiers to linked duplicates results in much higher memory consumption in Blender. This mostly impacts larger scenes. Changing the smooth type to Autosmooth and unchecking the gaps option results in no modifiers and very low memory usage. This isn't very obvious and is difficult to find information on. The best link I can find at the moment is from the mecabricks forum.
https://www.mecabricks.com/en/forum/topic/1511

This also impacts ImportLDraw as mentioned in TobyLobster/ImportLDraw#61. The memory savings in this case are actually because the default import settings result in modifiers rather than memory savings from "duplifaces". The memory savings I get from instancing on faces vs creating actual objects in my import addon are pretty negligible.

[cuddlyogre]

Thanks for this. The difference when importing http://omr.ldraw.org/files/337 is about 500MB, which is pretty massive.