Sorry for editing this comment; I needed to fix some typos especially in my Jenkins version number.
I have this issue too on Jenkins 2.121.1, which I installed in the last week.
The symptoms are the same: increased memory usage at regular 5s intervals.
This only appears to occur on pages with the "Build Queue" and "Build Executor Status" widgets.
I have a lot of executors in my Jenkins instance: between 200 and 210. There's quite a bit of build activity because we have a large number of developers, so I see very quick memory growth.
I did a memory profile in Chrome of type "Allocation instrumentation on timeline" to see what was leaking.
I saw a lot of "(closure)", "Detached HTMLTableCellElement" and "HTMLAnchorElement".
Looking at the HTMLTableCellElements first, I saw some formatted job names. I worked backwards a bit to find that the were all inside "Detached HTMLTableRowElements".
Here's a sample of the outerHTML for one of those (item names changed, and whitespace/indentation added for clarity):
<tr>
<td class="pane" align="right" style="vertical-align: top">3</td>
<td class="pane"><div style="white-space: normal">
<a href="/job/my-folder/job/my-jobname/">My Folder » My Job Name</a>
<table tooltip="Started 20 hr ago<br> Estimated remaining time: 10 hr" style="cursor:pointer" href="/job/my-folder/job/my-jobname/44/console" class="progress-bar " title="Started 20 hr ago<br> Estimated remaining time: 10 hr">
<tbody><tr>
<td style="width:66%;" class="progress-bar-done"></td>
<td style="width:34%" class="progress-bar-left"></td>
</tr></tbody></table>
</div></td>
<td class="pane">
<a href="/job/my-folder/job/my-jobname/44/" class="model-link inside"><wbr>#44</a>
</td>
<td class="pane" align="center" valign="middle">
<a onclick="if(confirm("Are you sure you want to abort My Folder » My Job Name #44?"))new Ajax.Request("/computer/node%20name%20anonymized/executors/2/stop"); return false;" href="/computer/node%20name%20anonymized/executors/2/stop" class="stop-button-link"><img src="/static/175f9ede/images/16x16/stop.png" alt="terminate this build" style="width: 16px; height: 16px; " class="icon-stop icon-sm"></a></td></tr>
Using the "collect garbage" option in Chrome did not remove these objects.
I looked at the (closure) objects to see what they were using the "Retainers" panel in the Dev Tools.
These closures are referenced from "Detached EventListener" objects, referenced by "Detached InternalNode" objects, referenced by "Detached HTMLAnchorElement" objects.
I did one more thing: "Break on subtree modification" for div#side-panel in the Chrome dev tools.
That brought me to hudson-behavior.js, "p.replaceChild(node, hist)", which offers some insight into why there are a tree of detached elements: some element inside the tree may have an EventListener that is still referenced somewhere.
I tried the Firefox Dev tools next (as well as to confirm that the memory leak also occurs in Firefox.
Tracing call stacks on memory allocations showed that there's an issue with the call stack starting at the very next function call, "Behaviour.applySubtree(node)":

The _createResponder function in prototype.js seems to be the culprit.
It seems to always add the passed element to its CACHE array. It never cleans up the CACHE as far as I can tell, unless you unload the page in IE.
Because the CACHE contains a persistent reference to the HTMLAnchorElements which get event handlers, all of the anchor elements created in the Build Executor Window are persisted. That adds up fast.
I hope that makes this bug fixable - I had a window where these were visible and it used up 3GB of memory after a few hours.
Weird.
JENKINS-10912was supposed to be resolved in 2.23. Could it be related to that anyway?