Panels

Last month Matt from Celsius gave us a great presentation introducing the Drupal Panels module. Panels is certainly a cool module -- but my question at the time was, what's the performance hit?

I've started experimenting with it, in a new (unburdened, lightweight) test site, and I find that Panels pegs the PHP memory and generates "out of memory" errors, unless I turn off pratically everything else, even basic things like search and logging.

In other words, pratcially speaking, I can't use Panels.

This is on a shared-server arrangement, but I've got a dedicated MySQL container and 128M memory limit -- so it's not under-resourced. (And yes, I've checked the phpinfo and I really do have 128M memory limit.) Other sites I'm running on the same host have ten or twenty add-on modules running, and everything is fine. I have to conclude that Panels is a super memory hog.

Anyone else have experience with this, or suggestions? I'm thinking I'll have to stick with blocks and block visibility settings.