On a site with ~68k contacts, we find that occasionally we get a memory error on a simple contact creation (although we haven't noticed problems elsewhere). We have a fairly large PHP memory allotment to start with, and although I realize I could increase that further I am a little hesitant to go too much further there. I'm assuming the process that runs the dedupe check could be responsible for this.
Can anyone confirm that the duplicate check is most likely the culprit here? If so, is there a setting to disable that?