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

Hi Rau,

Thanks for your detailed reply. I'm not going to reinstall The Time to check, I am happy that we have identified the cause of the problem. I uninstalled it about 5 hours ago I think, and since then, Runtime Broker has not used more than 11 MB RAM at any given time. That is a huge difference to the 2.97 GB I reported when I first posted in this thread and I have Norton Internet Security running again so the only difference is that I uninstalled The Time. I believe that if I had failed to kill the process before, I would have seen the much higher figures of 4-6 GB RAM being used that others have reported.

I have already amended my initial review to warn other people - you can probably see it at the top of the reviews if you look now.

Thanks again and take care.

Hi Mark,

Yes, the app called The Time by Jeff Key is the same program I had as yours.  I agree what we have in common are Wikipedia and The Time so I began testing with Wikipedia first and I do see that Runtime Broker was consistently in the range of 19.1-19.7MB.  It never increased beyond that.

It took me a while to reply to you as I was still in the process of analyzing whether The Time is the cause of a memory leak but now feel I have a good answer for you (and whoever runs into the same issue and reads this thread).

Here is the data that I recorded:

Why is Runtime Broker consuming too much memory?  Appears to be a bad App.

10/31/2012 after removing downloaded Apps. 

           Runtime Broker memory consumed is 2.7-2.8MB. with Mail App actively running. 

           If mail app closed,then Runtime Broker memory consumed is 2.6MB with no Apps running

10/31/2012 3:06am Runtime Broker memory consumed is 3.7MB

10/31/2012 8:25am Runtime Broker memory consumed is 3.5MB

10/31/2012 8:37am after Wikipedia install Runtime Broker memory consumed is 19.3MB

10/31/2012 8:58am Runtime Broker memory consumed is 19.5MB then went to 19.1MB

11/1/2012 12:13am memory used by Runtime Broker is consistently in the range of 19.6-19.7MB

11/1/2012 12:14am installed The Time (the one created by Jeff Key).  Runtime Broker memory consumed is is 19.7MB

11/1/2012 12:17am Runtime Broker memory consumed is 20.7MB

11/1/2012 12:31am Runtime Broker memory consumed is 59.3MB

As you can see, it was only after I installed The Time did Runtime Broker memory usage began to increase significantly.  I'll now uninstall it and report feedback in "Store" that this is a problem.

Good luck to you and I'm glad to be of help to you and whoever else is out there.

You may just be my hero!

Since uninstalling The Time app and rebooting (memory was not released just by uninstalling it), Runtime Broker has been using a steady 4-5MB of RAM, and that's with Norton Internet Security running too. It goes up to about 6MB when I open IE and Mail etcetera but the key thing is that it appears to be releasing memory when I close these apps - something it did not do previously.

I tried opening as many Metro apps at the same time as I could and it still didn't go haywire so I am really hoping that this is an end to my problems.

[Side note: I did notice that when I had more apps open than would fit in the strip of open applications that appears on the left side of your screen (when you move your mouse from the top left to the bottom), that those which were not displayed in this strip did not reappear when I closed some of the other apps. However, when I checked in Task Manager they were indeed still running. The only way I could find of closing them (short of killing them in Task Manager of course) was to go to start menu screen, open them again and then close them. This seems to be something of a design fault but maybe a topic for another day.]

I'm going to keep an eye on Runtime Broker today as I have had my hopes raised before, but I have to say it looks very good so far - thanks Gary.

**And many thanks to RauOte  - if you hadn't noticed this behaviour, fixed it on your own PC and shared your list of uninstalled apps, I'd probably still be sitting here swearing at my screen. I'm very grateful and I hope you can now reinstall your other apps without any further issues.**

EDIT: I know this is a little off-topic but in the interests of fairness I thought I should mention that I received a follow up telephone call from Norton this morning to ask if everything was alright. Whilst this in no way makes up for the ineptitude of one particular member of their chat support team, they do at least care enough to try to rectify any problems experienced by their customers and the other chat support people I have spoken with in the past have always been 100% professional.

I hope that doesn't sound too much like an advertorial for Norton but I thought I should mention it as I did blast them earlier.

I also had the problem with Runtime Broker using 700+ MB of memory.  I did have "The Time" app installed.   I uninstalled The Time, restarted, and now Runtime Broker is using about 3 or 4 MB of memory.

I found another app called "Clock" by Jujuba Software that has the live tile time display, and it seems to be running fine with no ill effects on memory.

The only two we have in common are Wikipedia and The Time.

To make sure we are talking about the same time app you can check the details in the app store program - mine was developed by Jeff Key (it's a green tile).

Outside of metro apps I installed Stardock's Start8 button but I stopped that program for an hour or so and it did not seem to make any difference to the behaviour of Runtime Broker so I am ruling that out as a potential troublemaker for now.

I'm going to uninstall the two apps we have in common (one at a time) and see if it has any effect at all but I am not overly optimistic.