So when I first installed gradle, I enabled the daemon to speed up the build time of my projects, but when working on one of them, my computer had me close some processes, in order to free up memory. When I checked Task Manager straight after, I saw up to 100 instances of the JVM running. When I disabled the daemon, and restarted my RAM usage went from 5gb to under 1gb.
100 instances of the JVM is mentioned in Gradle daemon becomes unusable - resurrected . It might be a completely different issue.