Comment 4 for bug 1404603

On further experimentation, it seems that GLib (or whatever is responsible for handling free memory) does not release free memory to the system until the program is closed? Even a very simple program that keeps creating a list of GObjects and then destroys them does not release the memory it has used - but it reuses the memory freed. So System Monitor shows a low initial memory usage which jumps to a large value when a large list of objects is created but does not fall when the list is destroyed (being sure to unref the Objects). However when the list is recreated the memory does not jump again so it has not leaked and become unusable. Files uses a number of lists and hash-tables which can become large when viewing or handling large numbers of Files. So the memory tends to stay at the largest amount needed at any point in time. I notice that the same effect can be observed in Thunar.