The problem described here on the Debian bug tracker (Debian Bug 587250)
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=587250
also applies to the curlftpfs package as provided by openSUSE
(curlftpfs-0.9.2-59.1.3). On my system, touching ~8k files on a filesystem
mounted with curlftpfs requires about 1.6 GByte of memory. 

The following patch, also found on the Debian bug tracker, solves the problem
for me: 
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?filename=curlftpfs-0.9.2-free_ftpfs_file-memleak-fix.patch;att=1;msg=5;bug=587250
Touching ~8k files (or just any number of files) does not require more then 10
MByte of memory on my system after applying this patch.