High memory usage when rendering hair

I came from years of modeling with Rhinceros and V-Ray, and I never encountered such memory problem when rendering too much hair.

Yesterday I tried rendering a simple towel and my PC just froze for serveral minutes. I used 1.000.000 strips of hair on it, but it shouldn’t bork my system (I suppose), which has 4 GB of RAM.
When it finished rendering Blender displayed the memory usage as not even 2 GB.

Is the high mem consumption correct, meaning I should get at least 4 more GB of RAM?

Here’s the towel:

http://s12.postimg.org/dy2t7vkgb/untitled.png

yes get more ram. hair has alway been a bit hard on the memory. cycles seems to handle it better than internal though.

Depends on the type of hair primitive you’re using. But yeah, hair in general is a big memory consumer in path teaching. The bvh and data structures could be more efficient, especially compared to something like Arnold, but it’s very non trivial to get speedups and memory savings here.