Graphics
Intel® graphics drivers and software, compatibility, troubleshooting, performance, and optimization
20501 Discussions

BUG: dwm.exe uses memory leakage with Intel HD Graphics 630

Cody
New Contributor I
512,671 Views

Hi,

dwm.exe (Desktop-Window Manager) uses high memory with Intel Intel HD Graphics 630. This problem has been reported before:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/desktop-windows-manager-dwm-memory-leakage-in/c2968fb0-ee26-4483-9f08-dfa19149cd24

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/iqttw5/windows_10_dwmexe_high_ram_usage/g4umzyn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

 

Here's a screenshot of my dwm ram usage after 2 hours (1.6 GB):
Image1.jpg

 

Please, this bug is already known for 3-4 months, and I do not want to reinstall a 2019 driver...

1 Solution
Gabriela_Intel
Moderator
316,526 Views

It seems that everyone has posted positive results so far about beta driver 101.1121 resolving this dwm leak issue. I'm going ahead and marking this thread as resolved! Please note that we'll specifically call out this fix in the release notes of our next production driver release to the Download Center which will be found here once available.

 

Special thanks to @HKlum@TurboTacho@Ansuel, and the MANY others that dedicated their time testing and providing various dump files. I really appreciate you all sticking by our side after all this time to make sure this long-standing problem gets resolved. You folks are what make this Community forum so great. We couldn't have done it without you! 😊

 

For those of you that continue to exhibit issues: Please create new individual threads so we can assess if it is a separate issue or not for your particular case.

 

Thanks again everyone!!

View solution in original post

612 Replies
Azure
Novice
8,408 Views

I find it baffling that you say 'not to sound rude' but you do exactly that. You did nothing to provide any useful addition to Serene's post nor did you provide anything contributing to the conversation right there. In fact, from what I'm reading, all your comments after the fact have been about as useful as a leaf blower in a house fire.
' Yes, obviously that will clear the memory. But that is not a workaround.'
If we're really going to get technical here because you seem so adamant that Serene's workaround is not infact a workaround, I'll so humbly provide you with this piece of information, sourced from dictionary.cambridge website the definition of workaround is as follows:

 
a way of dealing with a problem or making something work despite the problem, without completely solving it:

There's a difference between a workaround and a solution.
So, on from this. Let's review, someone here on a forum has provided their experience which has seemed to have resolved the issue they're dealing with albeit a temporary solution but a solution nonetheless and all you can do is shrug it off, say it's not a workaround and call it nonsense will making zero contribution to the conversation in any meaningful way.

If anyone should delete their post, it should be you. All you've done is made comments filled with unprovoked animosity and really, I just think it's sad and pathetic.




 

HKlum
Valued Contributor I
8,509 Views

@Woz58 "someone for giving a mild workaround." That was NOT A WORKAROUND. "Also, you do know what workaround means, right?" I do. You dont. Same as @Azure I guess.

"a way of dealing with a problem or making something work despite the problem, without completely solving it". Restarting or resetting something is not a workaround. It would be the same as saying "throw the Pc out of the window, buy a new one, use it until memory leaks, then throw it out, buy a new one." THAT IS TOTALLY NONSENSE.

Restarting a PC is redundant knowledge everyone has. That is nothing you write a huge post about with huge bold WORKAROUND.

0 Kudos
Azure
Novice
8,499 Views

That's a workaround that's worked for them. It temporarily resolved the issue, but you're likening it to saying 'throw pc out window, buy new one, rinse and repeat'.
This just proves that you're also intellectually incapable of courtesy to some degree. They made a post, on a forum, providing their experience with this issue and what has worked for them. You seem to be venting for no reason, you're trying to put someone down for trying to help and I just can't process in my head which part of your brain thinks at some point that 'you know what? I'll respond in a negative manner even though this person is providing their experience.' 
They formatted their text and you have issue with that? They wrote a lengthier post than you would want? Listen up sweet cheeks, that's just making the post readable, but you can probably debate that I'm sure with some eloquent response that you're thinking up as you're reading this. 

Again, I don't see where this unprovoked animosity is coming from. Just read it and move on, that's what you could have done. But somewhere in your head you just couldn't do that?

Serene
Novice
8,533 Views

I'd like to think my DWM.exe not using 300mb in a matter of minutes post-shutdown > bootup when using restart instead of booting up from a shutdown would be considered a workaround. 


TurboTacho
New Contributor II
8,611 Views

Just a little shocker while I was playing games/test streaming on Twitch/chatting on Discord with friends. My laptop completely froze for a good minute or two because it ran out of RAM (that's 64GB), and peaked at 95% at around 45GB before going down slightly.

DWM.0.png

Though I'm running on 27.20.100.9466. Half my senses tell me it's partially Microsoft's to blame as well. But apparently they only have community forums and not actual ones...

robinallan_25
Beginner
9,728 Views

A solution: on my Dell desktop 8930 I switch the tower on but delay turning on the monitor for a few minutes (up to five). This prevents the ludicrous escalation of window manager seemingly permanently - do not know why this should be but it might help until a proper resolution is found!  

DominatorNW
Novice
9,132 Views

It's Intel drivers issue my brother has a laptop with the same version of Windows but he doesn't have intel graphics he has nvidia graphics and no problems. why intel whyyyyy 😭😭😭😭😭😭

I have a Core i7 7700, Intel HD 630 and if I have the problem of dwm.exe and it consumes me up to 1.5Gb of RAM.

the same goes for my sister she has Intel HD 530 and only 4Gb of RAM and the process consumes almost all the RAM

DominatorNW
Novice
9,137 Views

it's intel's problem to me and my sister (HD 630/530) we do the same with dwm.exe consumes 1.5GB of RAM and my brother doesn't, he has nvidia graphics without integrated graphics (we all have the same version of windows) 20H2

HKlum
Valued Contributor I
9,047 Views

I found out why <= 27.20.100.8476 fixes the memory leak and was able to verify this. It seems there is a bug in <= 27.20.100.8476, which will prevent modern standby to work. The laptop will not enter deep sleep (c10) when you revert back to <= 27.20.100.8476, and therefor wont trigger the issue with dwm.exe in the first place. So the theory, that this is indeed connected with standby and also hibernate is correct.

I also noticed that when you disable a dGPU in device manager and use >  27.20.100.8476 this wont trigger the issue too, because this will also break modern standby. Disabling a device in device manager will prevent the laptop to enter modern standby, therefor no memory leak happens. You can test this with powercfg /sleepstudy and see a 0% HW DRIPS state when this is not working, ergo no modern standby happening.

Never using hibernate, fast startup and/or modern standby after a reboot, and the issue wont ever happen. Every modern standby or hibernate usage has a chance to trigger the issue.

I am using latest 27.20.100.9466 with dGPU turned of, which allows c10 states, but not DRIPS state, which is fine for me, because I am just using the laptop on power cord, so this is a workaround for people who wont use the laptop on battery.

So people not using standby at all with their laptop wont ever see this issue happening, who just shutdown their laptop every day and reboot it.

This might also the reason why Intel "couldn't reproduce it", because they obviously didn't use standby or not long enough in between testing periods.

If you just reboot the laptop and wont ever use standby or hibernate in between, this issue wont ever happen.

So this might not be an Intel driver bug at all, but 100% a Windows bug. Also why there are no reports with Nvidia/AMD GPUs because there is no modern standby on desktop.

Bryce_Intel
Moderator
9,034 Views

@HKlum Cool thanks! I'll pass this along to the Dev that's working on it. Hopefully this helps them focus on the right area for root cause. Stay tuned...

DominatorNW
Novice
8,987 Views

Thank you for your help but the only thing that works for me is to finish the Windows process and wait for it to go up slowly... I had to increase my RAM to 32GB because that process just consumes everything!!!!!  

If this continues i change to a amd laptop sorry intel  I loved you but not now 😪😪😪

Serene
Novice
8,960 Views

I assume using "restart" (actual restart, not hibernate, sleep or shutdown) doesn't fix your issue so I'm going to give you the official steps to reverting the driver back to something more stable, 'cause people deserve to be able to use their computers with some stability! 


First: 

How to Disable Automatic Driver Downloads on Windows 10
  1. Right click the Start button and select Control Panel.
  2. Make your way to System and Security.
  3. Click System.
  4. Click Advanced system settings from the left sidebar.
  5. Select the Hardware tab.
  6. Press the Device Installation Settings button.
  7. Choose No, and then press the Save Changes button.



Second:
(Copied from Reddit thread about this issue)The Intel HD drivers are at fault. As I was recomended in the comments below, download the intel HD 24.20.100.6286 drivers, download Wagnard's DDU, install it, boot in to safe mode and use it to remove the intel drivers, reboot as recommended and install the intel drivers, restart, shut down, then boot in to Windows normally a your issues should be solve. 

OgUrecheK
Beginner
8,834 Views

A similar problem, sometimes the process uses less than 1 GB, and in rare cases it can take all the free memory.
Basically, the process consumes 50-150 MB.

 

Laptop: MSI GS65 8RE

Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 -> 27.20.100.9466

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 -> 27.21.14.6627

OS: Win10 Home x64 ver. 20H2 build 19042.985

 

MrX1980
New Contributor I
8,709 Views

Info:

Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 21382 | Windows Insider Blog

Fixes
- We fixed a memory leak that could result in DWM unexpectedly using a lot of memory over time.

 

So I will check this the next days.

 

Ximik
Beginner
8,408 Views

Thank you for info about build 21382. It looks like the leak is gone. The memory used for 16 hours was in the range of 550 MB +- 50 MB, but sometimes it rose to 1 GB.  (When turning off the second monitor, used memory dropped to 250MB).

But I don't ready use dev version and planning return to stabile. 

(Use the developer version at your own risk)

Ximik_0-1621156054250.png

 

Ximik
Beginner
8,204 Views

If someone also installs the developer version, could you upload the new version of dwm.exe?

0 Kudos
MaxHugen
Novice
8,129 Views

Well I sure hope either MS or Intel sort this out! 

I just received a Dell G7 7700 laptop, and was shocked to see DWM hitting 2Gb in Task Manager.   Now I'm wasting hours of my time wading through 7 months of comments at MS and Intel forums looking for a fix.

Unbelievable! 

MrX1980
New Contributor I
7,630 Views

With Windows 10 Build 21382 and Intel graphic driver 30.0.100.9559 I still see spikes around 550MB. That is 500MB too much.
(Lenovo Yoga 710-14IKB Type 80v4 / BIOS v2.12 / i5-7200U / HD 620)

Win10_21382_DWMBug_01.png

0 Kudos
Created_Only4_DWMexe
8,423 Views

Same issue; been while. I'd like to add sth. I'm afraid this is off-topic, but I thought these might be related:

When I put the notebook into hibernate, I'll get "DPC_Watchdog_Violation" error, right after turning it on.

When hibernation is enabled in control panel: power options, even when I shutdown the PC, error happens at startup again.

Error won't show up if I disable hibernate in power options.I struggled so much to solve the issue w/o disabling hibernate, But couldn't.

Serene
Novice
8,271 Views

I'm going to have you run a few things and see if it you still get the DPC_Watchdog_Violation bluescreen if that's okay. 

Go to search (right click start and click search) 
Type in CMD, right click it and run as administrator 
Enter the following: DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
Let that run and finish

Then do the following
Go to search (right click start and click search) 
Type in CMD, right click it and run as administrator 
Enter the following: sfc /scannow
Let that run and finish

SFC might list errors which I want you to google how to fix them if you get any. 

Then try and see if you get the watchdog bluescreen? 

Reply