If Notion feels noticeably heavier than it did when your workspace was smaller, or if it's started climbing well past what a notes app seems like it should need, that pattern has been reported by other users in similar detail.
Why Notion's architecture makes this more likely as your workspace grows
Notion is built on Electron, the same Chromium-and-Node.js framework used by many modern cross-platform apps, which brings a real baseline memory cost before you've opened a single page. On top of that baseline, Notion's core feature, a deeply nested, richly formatted workspace of linked pages, databases, and embedded content, means the app has to keep track of a genuinely complex object graph in memory as you navigate around. A workspace with a handful of simple pages behaves very differently from one with hundreds of interlinked pages, large databases with many properties, and embedded files or images, because the amount of structural data Notion needs to hold in memory to render and search across all of that scales with how much you've actually built inside it.
What triggers the more dramatic jumps
User reports describing the jump from 1-2GB to 8GB or more tend to coincide with specific actions: opening a large database view with many rows and properties, searching across a large workspace, or having several Notion windows or tabs open simultaneously, each maintaining its own rendering state for different parts of your workspace. Separately, some reports point to specific browser-extension-style enhancer tools that modify Notion's desktop client, which can introduce their own memory issues on top of whatever Notion's base app is already using, so if you've installed any third-party Notion enhancement tool, that's worth ruling out as a contributing factor specifically.
What genuinely helps
Close unused Notion windows and tabs. If you tend to keep multiple Notion windows open for different projects, closing the ones you're not actively using reduces how much rendering state the app has to maintain simultaneously.
Avoid loading very large database views unnecessarily. If a particular database has thousands of rows, using filtered or smaller views rather than the full unfiltered table reduces what Notion needs to render and hold in memory at once, a pattern Notion's own help centre confirms directly: more visible properties, complex filters, and many simultaneously viewed inline databases all add to load time and overhead.
Check for third-party enhancer extensions. If you've installed any tool that modifies or extends Notion's desktop client beyond its official features, temporarily disabling it is a reasonable diagnostic step to see whether it's contributing to the memory jump you're seeing.
Restart Notion periodically during heavy use. As with other Electron apps, a full quit and reopen clears accumulated rendering state more thoroughly than navigating away from a heavy page alone.
Where a memory-relief tool fits in
Notion's own memory use while you're actively navigating a large workspace is doing genuine work rendering what you asked to see; a memory tool won't reduce that while you're using it. Where Shiny helps is everything else running alongside Notion: a browser with dozens of tabs, Slack, email, and other apps all competing for the same pool of memory. Freeing that up in one click gives Notion, and whatever else you're running, more headroom to work with.
For a wider look at similar apps sharing this architecture, see Electron apps on Mac: the growing footprint.
How workspace size compounds over time
Most people don't notice Notion's memory footprint growing because it happens gradually, the same slow accumulation pattern behind most "why does my Mac feel slower than it used to" complaints. A workspace that started as a handful of simple notes a year ago has, for many long-term users, grown into hundreds of pages, several databases with dozens of properties each, embedded files, and nested sub-pages several levels deep. None of that growth feels dramatic day to day, but the cumulative structural complexity Notion has to track and be ready to render at any moment scales with it. This is worth knowing specifically because the fix isn't necessarily "Notion has a bug," it can genuinely be "my workspace has become large enough that this is now the expected cost of using it this way," which changes what kind of fix actually makes sense.
Archiving as a genuine memory-management strategy
Beyond the day-to-day tips above, periodically archiving pages and databases you no longer actively reference, using Notion's own archive feature rather than deleting anything, is a legitimate long-term strategy for keeping your active workspace's footprint smaller. Archived content still exists and can be restored, but it's treated differently from your actively browsed pages, which is closer to how you might clean out an overflowing email inbox or downloads folder: not because the old content is worthless, but because keeping it separate from your daily working set genuinely helps performance. This is a habit worth revisiting every few months for anyone whose workspace has grown substantially since they first set it up, in much the same way a periodic tidy-up of any long-lived digital space tends to pay off over time.