Well, it takes approximately 6 hours, but it does eventually reach a steady state for memory consumption. While waiting for it to stabilize I implemented the device-hierarchy. Unfortunately, I'm now seeing hard-hangs every once in a while on my machine (looks like yet another database-driven problem, as it's occurring just after the hierarchy import completes (close to the place the evil bug shows up on FreeBSD)).

All tolled, we're running around 600MB to scan 1500 modems, but there's a fairly large initial constant (around 200MB) to that, so I'm guessing that with a 2GB machine we can hold around 8000 modems in memory. There are likely ways I can reduce that, I've not spent any cycles on memory optimisation at all.

Anyway, time for the project is well and truly exhausted, and so am I, so I'm calling it a night and a wrap for the development effort. Haven't updated the server to run the new code (i.e. with the device hierarchy), as I want to make sure we remain steady-state on the memory usage... will do the update tomorrow.