Since upgrading to Mountain Lion, I've been noticing that the Finder has a fondness of gobbling up multiple gigabytes of real memory. Although a quick relaunch gets it back down to <100 MB, this doesn't seem to be how it's intended to be used.
Is there any way to introspect why it's using so much memory (e.g. with the developer tools), and what I may be doing wrong (or have installed) that can address this?
Update: I noticed that it starts ballooning immediately after an “All My Files” window is opened. However, I'm fairly certain it has also reached the multi-GB level in instances where I haven't opened “All My Files”.
/Library/DropboxHelperTools
and possibly trying on another user account if the issue persists. By the way, my Mac starts crapping out as well when I click "All My Files", but my Finder is using around 100 MB real memory, constantly.mds
you could try disabling Spotlight and testing:sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
(reenable withload
instead ofunload
)