Comment 13 for bug 890441

ok, so trying on an oneiric system there nautilus starts around 16mb and is still using that after 15 minutes, so it's clearly not all systems

something else you can try is to change nautilus to not display the background:
- run gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false
- then run nautilus --quit
- then run nautilus in valgrind, that will open a browser window, let it open for 5 minutes then close it, that should quit nautilus since it's not displaying the background and no view is kept open
- then attach the valgrind log to the bug

getting a log this way might be better since nautilus will be closed "properly" there which will let valgrind get a better summary or what memory was freed as it should (if you stop it with --quit or ctrl-C you might prevent some callbacks to run which will change the summary)