Well, if I remember correctly the 3.0 alphas have a larger memory footprint than the 2.0 variations. I have not tried the alphas yet, so I cannot give you a comparison point.

I am running 2.01, I have my ReserveCache set to 180, and that seems to work for me. I am able to console into the player and ftp without a problem. I have never seen the slow menu problem, personally, so I suspect it is alpha related.

The easiest test is to drop to 2.0, delete and rebuild your databases. Because this version is not aware of any extra memory, you eliminate that from the equation. You would still see some benefit at the kernel level, because hijack will still access it, but the player application will not try to grab from the extra RAM for its cache. It is a good check to see if the behavior changes.

If this works, then move up to 2.01 and compare the differences. If you are running more background applications than I am (I just run hijack normally) you may need to set aside more memory for those.

By the way, I am sorry to read in the other thread that your empeg is smoking again.