https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34342
--- Comment #30 from Bob badbeeker@gmail.com --- I've been having good luck with a patched version of wine from foresto (https://launchpad.net/~foresto/+archive/ubuntu/winepatched). I don't see the same amount of memory usage, and the eventual crash, using his version of wine. His version brings in Stefan Dösinger's Direct3D command stream multithreading work, which seems to be able to keep up with the deallocations of textures. I've just done some "dumb" testing running version 1.7.51 and foresto's version side by side. The launcher using 1.7.51 (main and staging branches) version, while installing the game for the first time, ends up crashing after consuming 3gb of memory. Also the game will crash out after it hits the 3.7gb threshold.
Using foresto's version, I notice that the game keeps a constant memory footprint (for the most part). The launcher hovers around 200MB and the game doesn't crash after 4 hours of use. It also seems to handle WvWvW (which is what really accelerates the memory issue) and the game hasn't crashed yet. I believe it's the multithreading work that Stefan Dosinger has done that helps prevent this out of memory situation.
I've tried other versions of wine from 1.7.35 (which is what POL installs when you install the game) to various 1.7.x-staging builds with CMTS enabled. All have a similar issue around the memory usage.