Desktop Windows Manager (DWM) memory leakage in Windows 10 (Version 2004).

Anonymous
2020-09-06T11:24:54+00:00

The infamous dwm.exe hogging lots of memory. FYI this is not a specific program issue. It just happens with any programs, activities randomly.

I'm getting really tired of killing dwm.exe every so often so that it will release the occupied memory. When is this going to be fixed? Is this ever going to be fixed even?

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Performance and system failures

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-03-12T12:43:09+00:00

    I've been experiencing the same issue, with DWM having a huge memory leak and grinding my laptop to a halt a few hours after a hibernation. The problem went away when I downgraded my Intel UHD 630 driver from version 27.20.100.8935 to version 26.20.100.8141, but I'd really rather have the latest drivers for security and compatibility purposes. I'm on Windows 10 Pro Version 10.0.18363 Build 18363 on a Dell G5 5587 with Dell BIOS 1.14.0,

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-03-10T17:10:28+00:00

    Unfortunately, yes that's the only viable solution, at the expense of possibly unpatched security vulnerabilities, and reduced performance.

    I've done a lot of extensive testing. It seems that hybrid sleep/hibernation is the root cause of this. It's a massive shame that Microsoft/Intel aren't seriously looking at this "resource wastage" problem, leaving it to the consumers at their own in circles.

    One moderator in Intel forums mentioned that we had to bring up the issue to Microsoft forums for their attention, since they couldn't get the same issue as many of us are facing, replicated one-for-one. And Microsoft forums doesn't seem to be looking into this matter. What a huge cul-de-sac dilemma we have...

    Another method is to disable hibernation or sleep, and perform a full shut down (Shift + Shut down). Hybrid shut down will also result in DWM.exe leaking badly too.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-12-28T06:53:37+00:00

    Hmmm, same problem here, but the behavior is a little bit different...

    Using the latest driver 27.20.100.9079, DWM definitely leaks memory (sometimes inflating to a maximum size of ~2G), but it somehow manages to reclaim some of them, and the memory usage drops back after a while, maintaining an average usage under ~500M

    Weird, right? Right now it's at ~100M after running for 3 days😂

    One thing I can confirm is that switching windows/desktop will cause memory usage to rise, but I've never managed to replicate a rise to above 500M in my testing

    The rig is a Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 2, Xeon E-2276M w/ UHD 630, 24G RAM, and a Quadro T2000

    Running 20H2, Build 19042.685

    P.S. Might've discovered a svchost(Agent Activation Runtime) handle leak on my way to testing...😅Right now it seems to be stable at ~4 million handles, with no obvious influence on the system...

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-12-17T19:08:50+00:00

    Same problem here. ;/

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-11-27T09:31:55+00:00

    Mine is not an Intel driver problem, as I am using an Nvidia Super 2080. The process grows to 7GB. So will there be any fix for this ?

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