[Plugin: Google XML Sitemaps] – Performance issues

I’m running this plugin (3.2.4)on my WP install, and experiencing some troubles lately, with some “out of memory” errors.

So i have started testing the plugin on my computer locally to speed up testing, enabling higher limits on memory usage and timeouts, basically restricted on the “official” shared-server hosting.

As a result this is are the results to run the plugin on some 8,000 posts on my computer:

* Your sitemap was last built on June 4, 2010 1:11 pm.
* Your sitemap (zipped) was last built on June 4, 2010 1:11 pm.
* The building process took about 403.49 seconds to complete
and used 93.25 MB of memory.

So that’s it, some 6 minutes running a LOT of memory consumption and, worst of all, 40/50% of CPU usage during the whole build process.

Wondering if this is by design and if there are any tweaks to lower down resources usage.