[Q] Google Play Services extreme memory footprint topic

Hello all,

I have Samsung Galaxy Nexus, running CM 10.2.0. I had no problems until about 2 weeks ago.

I noticed that my phone got rather sluggish and I investigated what is going on. Looking at the list of running apps I immediately noticed that Google Play Services is using 130MB of memory instead of usual 30-40MB. By looking inside details of that process, I can see that the culprit is android.process.acore, which is using 84MB.
Similarly, looking at memory footprint using application OS Monitor, I see Search Applications Provider sitting on top of the memory usage list with 108.2 MB.

Restarting the phone gets everything back to normal for a while. I can trigger this problem reliably by going into Dialer app and calling someone. But even if I am not calling anyone, this issue seems to come back by itself. I am not sure, but maybe contacts synchronization?
It seems like Search/Contact provider is not releasing the resources and gets stuck.

What I tried so far:

-> freezing Search Applications Provider with Titanium backup. This solves the issue, but I lose Google Now functionality, which I would really like to keep using :/
-> deleting Search Applications Provider data - problem persisted
-> deleting Contacts and Contact Storage data - problem persisted
-> Disabled all categories that Search should be indexing in the phone - problem persisted


Please advise how to solve this issue. I have searched this forum, went through a lot of threads, but all I found was acore crashing, not acore using too much memory.

p.s. I am not an newbie, I know my way around android, linux, programming, debugging etc.

Thanks.