I've scoured the web, but I'm sick of reading "scan your computer for viruses" and "upgrade your RAM" on answers to similar questions to this. I understand that dwm.exe is for (simply put) caching bitmaps for things like Aero-peek and similar, but as far as I have read it shouldn't be using vast amounts of memory. My colleague and I both have 4GB of RAM, Core 2 Duo, blah, blah -- essentially they're pretty capable. His dwm.exe is running at around 30mb, mine is currently running at about half a gig, though it does fluctuate quite a lot. This is the same while running the exact same applications (currently Zend studio, FireFox (with firemin - low memory usage), Outlook). Every so often I will get a notification asking me if I want to switch to Aero Basic because it's using too much memory, and sometimes it will just switch itself to basic and let me know why. I know it's possible to stop it switching, but I want to know why it is using too much memory otherwise it's just papering over the cracks.

One thing to add is this seems to have started after a robbery on Monday, where two of my monitors were stolen, and I had to temporarily use a couple of alternative monitors. windows 7 professional 64 bit ohne cd installierenI am now using brand new monitors but the problem is the same. auto glass repair cambridge mdAll drivers installed and working seemingly fine.windows 7 product key smudged Any ideas why the usage is so high?windows 7 desktop heap size We are using windows 7 64-bit Professional.laptop festplatte kaputt windows 7 neu installieren

windows-7 memory aero dwmEXE process will consume a lot of memory when you have multiple screens and the system performance is set to the default of Let Windows choose what's best for my computer. window film for darkening Go to Computer -> Right click and choose Properties Select the Advanced tab Select the Settings button under the Performance section. This will popup the Performance Options window On the first tab is Visual Effects. Select Adjust for best performance or Custom (and select the feature(s) you want). I chose Custom myself and selected only the Smooth edges of fonts to reduce memory usage from 534M to 6M with running 4 windows. Since I cannot comment yet, I'll add this as additional answer. Microsoft has confirmed a memory leak in DWM.EXE leaks memory when status windows are open for a long time. Try restarting the dwm service: Hit Win+r and type services.msc.

Find Desktop Window Manager Session Manager. Click Restart the service and see if that fixes it. Or if you want to get rid of the process all together, just click Stop. Another speed up tip is to hold the windows key and press r, type msconfig and press enter, click on boot tab > advanced options then check mark number of processors then click the down arrow and select max number of cores 2 is duo 4 is quad hit ok. Check mark boot log and OS boot information, then in the right click make all boot changes permanent and make sure nothing else is open and hit apply then restart. Most Microsoft windows computers only use one core by default boot settings. This works on windows 8 and 8.1 for sure. I haven't tried it on anything before that.Browse other questions tagged windows-7 memory aero dwm or ask your own question.Memory leaks are a class of bugs where the application fails to release memory when no longer needed. time, memory leaks affect the performance of both the particular application as well as the operating system.

large leak might result in unacceptable response times due to excessive paging. Eventually the application as well as other parts of the operating system will experience failures. Windows will free all memory allocated by the application on process termination, so short-running applications will not affect overall system performance significantly. However, leaks in long-running processes like services or even Explorer plug-ins can greatly impact system reliability and might force the user to reboot Windows in order to make the system usable again. Applications can allocate memory on their behalf by multiple means. Each type of allocation can result in a leak if not freed after use. Here are some examples of common allocation patterns: Monitoring the resource consumption of your application over time is the first step in detecting and diagnosingUse Windows Task Manager and add the following columns: "Commit Size", "Handles", "User Objects", and "GDI Objects".

you to establish a baseline for your application and monitor resource usage over time. The following Microsoft tools provide more-detailed information and can help to detect and diagnose leaks for the various allocation types in your application: Certain coding and design practices can limit the number of leaks in your code. My Desktop Window Manager memory usage keeps spiking and causing it to disable Aero, saying it ran out of allowed memory. DWM restarts and comes back up fine when I kill its process. Why is this happening? How can I correct it? Can I change the amount of memory it's allowed? Intel Core 2 Quad / EVGA 680i mobo (3x) Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4760 (multi-mon setup, not Crossfire setup)Now on an AMD Phenom 2 1055T with 16GB DDR3. Same install of Windows 7 and same video cards (Though the new mobo, an MSI nf980-g65 also has onboard HDMI, which I'm now also using). I find it happens more often when I have browser(s) open, and when I have Seesmic (A Silverlight out-of-browser application) open.

windows-7 crash aero memory-leaks window-manager The official unofficial explanation from Windows Engineering team on this this is that Windows is pinning GPU Accelerated applications to your primary video card. The engineering team describes it as a "very inefficienct" to use a GPU Accelerated app on a non-primary video card. They are very dismissive of the fact that this worked for many years and now all GPU rendering applications run a high risk of taking down DWM. They know of no fix and claim no repro despite the repro being simple. Running multiple video cards in a non-SLI/Crossfire fashion and outputing to multiple monitors. Then moving a semi-active GPU accelerated application to a non-primary video card and monitoring the shared memory GPU allocations. They will spike relative to the activty of the GPU API for the application. Simply scrolling or typing in a GPU accelerated browser (Chrome, IE, Firefox) and you may run the risk of DWM allocating more GPU Shared ram faster than it can release it.

There may be issues surrounding reproing that perhaps are a combination of a ratio of Video Card ram to System Ram, however I can verify the GPU Shared memory spikes on ANY system with multiple video card setup. Whether it takes down DWM. DWM has a resource usage kill switch that kicks in when it exceeds a resource allocation relative to your machine. I am unsure if systems with more system RAM or systems with more GPU ram are more susceptible as quite often memory allocations are padded relative to your RAM. Start up 10 applications on 3 nearly identical systems but differing RAM amounts and you'll get different memory consumption. Again the official unofficial response to resolve this is - there is no solution and you should not run multiple video cards in a non-SLI/Crossfire setup. Disabling GPU Acceleration on the browser also works. IE9 is the only browser I'm aware of where disabling GPU Acceleration results in fairly decreased performance. Of course this issue also forces one to be very careful of where you run Flash/Silverlight/Movies.

On my setup it's pretty much suicide to run any of those on my 2nd video card despite it being the exact same as my primary one. First, I assume you're running a 64 bit version of Windows, or else, most of the 8GB are useless :) Second, I would check what have you installed lately that integrates with Windows explorer. E.g., TurtleSVN (SVN integration piece) that I've witnessed misbehave many times. Essentially, it enumerates every folder you touch in explorer, anticipating the need to integrate it with an SVN repository. And sometimes that causes slowdowns and leaks - in Windows Explorer memory space. Third, try to find out what else loads into your explorer memory space (use Process Explorer) and eliminate the real culprit. Another thing you can do is boot into safe mode and see if the problem occurs there as well. Fourth, do not rule out a virus or malware - check thoroughly for any of those. We ran into this specific situation very recently, specifically in the case of windows on a secondary GPU, very easily replicated on several machines.

This is an incredibly specific corner case, but I'm willing to bet it applies to you. Have the video cards in this machine ever been upgraded? If so, this is probably an artifact of previous DirectX configuration; Windows appears to not follow the correct upgrade paths from DX9 in every situation, and will instead try to run software emulation of newer features ("10Level9" they call it) which can cause undue load in dwm with hardware accelerated features, for instance Aero, on secondary GPUs. The fix that worked for us as follows:(You can just search it out on the Start Menu in Win7). Check to see if "InstalledVersion" = "00,00,00,09,00,00,00,00" and "Version" = "4.09.00.0904" If that's the case, delete the ENTIRE "DirectX" key. (If it's not, I may be barking up the wrong tree. Windows 7 should show 6.01.something though) Reboot the machine, and the problem should be resolved. Due to this (old) forum post being a top google search result for this problem, I am providing an update.