Comment 43 for bug 204413

 Deon Spengler wrote on 2009-04-09:

"In my testing this bug has nothing to do with the thumb-nailing of media files. To reproduce the bug create a folder on your desktop called bug, now inside the bug folder create a new folder called empty. Open System Monitor so that you can watch the memory usage of nautilus. Now with nautlus go into the empty folder once inside the empty folder go one dirctory up, then go back into the empty folder, do this process about 100 times and you will see that the memory usage of nautilus slowly starts growing."

Maybe the above is also related to this:

I recently used Nautilus to move a folder containing a large number of subfolders and files (~80,000 files, ~9Gb) to another disc. After completing the move (took about 20 minutes), Nautilus had consumed 190Mb of RAM, and didn't want to release it!

8.1 Intrepid (all updates)
GNOME 2.24.1
Nautilus 2.24.1
Intel P4 512Mb