what is runtime broker, and why does it use so much memory?

I just got off a long chat session with an Answer tech rep, or whatever they are called. He did actually take the time to listen to me and I used the MS Diagnostic tool to collect logs and upload it to them. He said that he will "endorse the case and pass it to his team lead so they can gather as much evidence from other users as possible". It took me a long time to actually get through to a live chat support rep but if everybody else who is experiencing this problem could do the same then we might get somewhere.

Listen to me - I'll be organising sponsored walks next! :)

I am using Norton 360 and I have the same issue, continuous incremental memory leak, and I am running the legit bought version of Win 8 Pro not the RTM version. I find closing RuntimeBroker.ex restores the memory back to normal. on my system about 2Gig used, but the process restarts itself and before long I'm back to less than 1 Gig free memory on an 8 Gig machine. This is something MS need to fix asap.

Yup the fault could well be in any application or windows itself. 

It is my first time here as well. :P I doubt developers would take the time to view whats going on in communities as most of the problems people discuss here are usually solved through the community itself. However, I think these threads are checked once in a while by some 'specialist'.

By the way it seems your antivirus is not the cause of your problem, right? :D

Unless we are all running the same application, the fault could lie with the Windows Runtime and the way that it releases resources / frees memory....or it could be one of the WinRT apps that comes with Windows 8 (or it could be something completely different!), either way I think that it's down to Microsoft to investigate the problem.

I haven't posted in here before - do MS developers ever answer our cries for help or do they leave us to moan to each other about our problems and just hope that we go away? :)

Hi,

I'm using Norton Internet Security and I have 500 days left on my subscription so I really hope you're not right!

So the runtime broker manages memory for applications that do not target the Windows Runtime as well as those that do? I thought it was only for new apps that ran in the metro interface...

I will see if removing NIS makes any difference on my machine but like you, I'll just have to live with it if it does.

I have had some other issues with metro-style apps not starting and reverting to the start menu when I open them but that's probably unrelated to this issue so I won't go into details here. I guess we have to expect a few teething problems although having said that, these kind of problems should have been ironed out before it was RTM'd.