I work remotely, and use a VPN where I have typical ping times to our CVS server in the 180ms - 240ms time range.
When IJ decides to do a cvs rlog operation to find the incoming changes, I see my CPU usage go up (50-75%) and IJ itself becomes very slow to respond.
Also during these operations, I've seen some OutOfMemoryErrors, though I cannot guarantee that the two are related, just that I have not seen IJ run out of memory in other situations.
FWIW, my idea.exe.vmoptions has the following:
-Xms32m
-Xmx192m
-XX:MaxPermSize=120m
-ea