I can confirm this behavior.
I'm running Linux Mint 13 (Cinnamon, 64-bit) with backports enabled. At this point, with an uptime of 8 days, and a bunch of appications open, nemo is up to 4.5 gigs of my 8 gigs of ram, and is using about 100% of one of my 4 cores. I noticed the problem when nemo started to get slow.
My configuration is pretty vanilla, I've added a few things here and there, but the only thing [that I can think of] which would affect nemo was adding RabbitVCS for svn, using the procedure here:
http://codemonkeymagic.blogspot.com/201 ... n-and.html
I'm not sure it it is related, but I also noticed that the output of ps aux --sort -%mem does not agree with what gnome system monitor displays, insofar as CPU% for nemo and /usr/bin/cinnamon
(ps aux --sort -%mem shows /usr/bin/cinnamon as using 79% of the CPU, and shows nemo as only using 0.8% (see the top 10 lines of output below), yet gnome system monitor at approximately the same time listed nemo as taking 96%, and cinnamon around 48%.
Output of ps aux --sort -%mem:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
goodwc3 6331 0.8 57.3 6634048 4666328 ? Rl Jan31 108:15 nemo
root 5304 7.3 9.6 758152 785328 tty7 Rs+ Jan31 915:44 /usr/bin/X :0 -audit 0 -auth /var/lib/mdm/:0.Xauth -nolisten tcp vt7
goodwc3 9987 1.6 8.6 1841280 702892 ? Sl Jan31 210:02 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox
goodwc3 5448 79.8 2.7 2039532 226348 ? Rl Jan31 9904:47 /usr/bin/cinnamon
goodwc3 5535 0.0 1.3 870476 112060 ? S Jan31 0:47 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/rabbitvcs/services/checkerservice.pyc
goodwc3 10802 1.2 0.8 1006424 66868 ? Sl Jan31 153:37 /usr/lib/firefox/plugin-container /opt/mint-flashplugin-11/libflashplayer.so -greomni /usr/lib/firefox/omni.ja 9987 true plugin
goodwc3 7169 0.0 0.7 1036436 62972 ? Sl 03:01 0:05 evince /tmp/oe-17-10-8246-1.pdf
goodwc3 5637 0.0 0.6 450444 55020 ? Sl Jan31 1:08 gnome-screensaver
goodwc3 20459 1.3 0.5 505184 44056 ? Sl 15:00 0:06 eog /home/goodwc3/Pictures/Screenshot from 2013-02-01 12:58:31.png
goodwc3 18861 0.1 0.4 1916064 34172 ? Ssl Jan31 23:40 /home/goodwc3/.dropbox-dist/dropbox
goodwc3 20737 0.0 0.3 1623464 27048 ? Sl Jan31 6:37 /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin --writer --splash-pipe=6
goodwc3 5464 0.0 0.3 1457920 26352 ? Sl Jan31 3:14 nautilus -n
goodwc3 31901 0.0 0.2 1171432 21684 ? Sl 02:30 0:09 evince /tmp/1-s2.0-S016943321101573X-main.pdf
goodwc3 2610 0.0 0.2 568176 20416 ? Sl Feb04 0:07 gnome-terminal
for good measure, here's the output of inxi -Fc 0
System: Host: goodwc3-ThinkPad-W530 Kernel: 3.2.0-23-generic x86_64 (64 bit) Desktop: Gnome Distro: Linux Mint 13 Maya
Machine: System: Dell product: Vostro 430 version: 00
Mobo: Dell model: 054KM3 version: A01 Bios: Dell version: 2.0.3 date: 03/15/2010
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i5 CPU 750 (-MCP-) cache: 8192 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx)
Clock Speeds: 1: 1200.00 MHz 2: 1200.00 MHz 3: 2668.00 MHz 4: 1200.00 MHz
Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series]
X.Org: 1.11.3 driver: fglrx Resolution: 2560x1440@60.0hz, 2560x1440@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series GLX Version: 4.2.11627 - CPC
Audio: Card-1: Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel Sound: ALSA ver: 1.0.24
Card-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series] driver: snd_hda_intel
Network: Card: Broadcom NetLink BCM57780 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe driver: tg3
IF: eth1 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: a4:ba:db:fb:bd:9a
Drives: HDD Total Size: 500.1GB (10.9% used) 1: /dev/sda ST95005620AS 500.1GB
Partition: ID: / size: 25G used: 5.8G (25%) fs: ext4 ID: /boot size: 109M used: 34M (33%) fs: ext4
ID: /home size: 257G used: 45G (19%) fs: ext4 ID: swap-1 size: 17.83GB used: 2.28GB (13%) fs: swap
Sensors: Error: You do not have the sensors app installed.
Info: Processes: 198 Uptime: 8 days Memory: 7703.6/7945.8MB Client: Shell inxi: 1.7.33
I'll be interested to hear if there is a fix.
Best Regards!