FordLawnmower
When you read that it may sound like alot but have
you checked how much memory it actually uses?

It says: if you expect that you'll be storing 1000 items in the table,
a table of N set to 100 is quite sufficient.

I'm not sure how to interpet that statement in relation
to how much memory it will use. I check my memory use
and can't see it changing between storing something and
then freeing the table.

I have several/many hash tables in my scripts and plan
to one day try to conglomerate them into one to four
main ones. I used them for many years without any
problems. I'm more concerned with writing to harddrive
or SSD or flash memory.