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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”.

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    What kind of applications do you have that modify Finder behavior in some way? (Think Dropbox, Google Drive for displaying icons, add-ons like TotalFinder, etc)
    – slhck
    Jan 10, 2013 at 19:44
  • Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. Just tried quitting all three and relaunching the Finder; no effect.
    – Slipp D. Thompson
    Jan 10, 2013 at 20:17
  • I'm farily certain that even when you quit Dropbox or similar, they will leave some kind of code in Finder. If it's not too much of a hassle you could try removing the /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.
    – slhck
    Jan 10, 2013 at 20:23
  • Tried removing that, quitting all of them and removed them from Login Items. No dice.
    – Slipp D. Thompson
    Jan 14, 2013 at 2:58
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    If it's mds you could try disabling Spotlight and testing: sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist (reenable with load instead of unload)
    – slhck
    Jan 14, 2013 at 7:35

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