No. Sounds like there is no relation to the memory use I am seeing. You mentioned the stall and I was just wondering if that stall was similar to what I see after I have kept the editor open and played several times. Your situation must be different because you get the stall on the first play.
You still might check if the stall is related to swapping by viewing your activity monitor. 16GB wouldn’t be enough for our game and if anything else were open (blender etc) it’s pretty easy to get a swap situation that would cause a stall.