ITunes :: 10.6 Nearing 1GB Of RAM Consumption?

I use iTunes primarily as a Home Sharing home-base to stream my TV Shows and Movies to Apple TVs in my home. As a result, it (as well as the iMac) are on 24/7 with the exception of a daily scheduled task which quits and reopens iTunes to sync unwatched media to my iOS devices at 4:30AM.   

I have noticed several things with iTunes 10.6 which I have documented in other questions here on the forums (long periods of unresponsiveness, the inability to scrub videos), but this issue may be just as significant and could be a root cause in my other problems. This particular question deals with RAM consumption. I have noticed for years that iTunes is a memory hog, so you won't find me shocked there, but what has shocked me is how the amount of RAM iTunes consumes has risen with the amount of RAM I've installed. I currently use an iMac (mid-2010) with a quad i7 and 16GB of RAM.  

I have noticed lately that upon opening iTunes 10.6.1 (and 10.6 before it) that iTunes immediately captures about 250MB of RAM. While I have plenty to spare in comparison, I've noticed that the amount of RAM it consumes swells considerably throughout the day. For example, my iTunes is completely idle right now - no devices are connected, no media is streaming or caching, no store purchases are downloading, and iTunes Match/Genius is not actively scanning anything - but my iTunes shows 605MB of RAM. When playing an m4v file converted from mp4 (so we're talking maybe a 200MB media file - not an MKV convert or anything in 1080p), I've noticed iTunes balloon to 900+MB of RAM. If I quit the application and open it again, it immediately snatches up that 250MB or so of RAM, then balloons within minutes. 

So while I expect iTunes to consume RAM, as it is a very resource-heavy and busy media center hub, I am surprised by the amount of RAM being consumed here and was wondering if anyone might be able to clarify whether I should consider this a "problem" or just iTunes being iTunes; and if it isn't a problem, are there still any suggestions toward how I could minimize RAM consumption? I realize that I have RAM to spare, but when I get into video conversions, music playback, and work on this computer (all the while my wife is streaming a video across the house on an Apple TV), I do want to make sure I'm not wasting memory on an application that might be ballooning unnecessarily (it is, after all, 6X the consumption of the next app in line). 

Just for those who might be wondering what I've already tried, I've worked on several quick fix ideas to help remedy the situation (and hoped they would fix the other issues I've experienced with iTunes 10.6): I've rebuilt the library by opening a new library and importing from my previous iTunes LIbrary file; I've created a new library, dragged any media to it, and tried to play it; I've run iTunes in 32-bit mode. None of these has resolved the issue. I have also attempted to run these files from a new user account (with a new library or with the existing library), and have tried them from an external troubleshooting drive which is also running Lion 10.7.3 and iTunes 10.6.1.

Info:
iMac (27-inch Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.7.3)