If you check the log, in addition to listing how long the render took, it also shows how much memory is being used. I never noticed that before but I read Nerd's comment, thought it would be helpful to know your actual memory usage, and then decided to look at the log before making a comment about it. Lo and behold!

My current scene has two figures, clothes, props and scenery for around 7500 MB.

If you use a lot of figures, you can also cheat and reuse textures. For example no one will notice if you use the same maps for the inner mouth and teeth on all your figures.