memory utilization questions?

Hi!

Very new to WordPress and loving it – thank you to all who make it, and make it easy!

I’ve been reading quite a bit on speeding up my site and have implemented some good advice but I noticed a few things regarding memory and would like to ask two questions:

1. Is there a way to dedicate x-amount of ram to specific plugins/processes? I’m thinking back to the OLD days, Dos 3.3 and 1mb (yes, Mb)ram limit, where we could load drivers into different portions of memory – anyone remember UMB’s? ??

2. From what I can tell my site slows down, which I would expect, doing heavy-duty imports – but WP/Apache/PHP/MySql (one or all of the above) isn’t taking advantage of all the memory I have.
Is there a way to change this?

For example – I have 2gb ram available – set in the php.ini I think – and using a very cool plugin – “Server IP & Memory Usage Display” I can see, at the bottom of the WP admin screen that the 2gb is allocated. Yet doing very memory intensive functions (importing several thousand posts using WP All Import, simultaneously from different browsers) the memory usage never goes over 5mb.

Thank you!
Trident