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

it seems that people managed to fix it with certain older versions of intel drivers

My dwm.exe is exploding now every day, since latest Intel drivers even more than before. No one at Intel is interested in looking into it as usual. I had reported several bugs to Intel in the past and that was their usual answer "cant reproduce".

It seems to get worse if you use sleep a lot actually. I can trigger it with Chrome and Firefox. Tried OpenGL in Chrome as Angle renderer, that didnt help anything.

I got this idea the other day, when I was thinking of what I did / changed and what was new in Windows 10 20H1 or 20H2 related to GPUs, so I knew this feature was newly introduced with 20H1:

https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/16/windows-10-v2004-hardware-accelerated-gpu-scheduling/

I knew I had enabled it (maybe it's since then enabled by default) on my laptop around end of 2020.

It also just is enabled, shown the option for, when the driver is supporting WDDM 2.4. That is also a total overhaul MS did with 2004, WDDM 2.4 (Windows Display Driver Model). So that might be a reason for this issue too. And also, why older Intel drivers, which dont support WDDM 2.4 dont show this issue.

I disabled Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling 2 days ago, and since then tried to reproduce the memory leak. Since then.... no memory leak anymore. This might be a "bad luck" coincidence, but it looks good so far, at least for my memory leak of dwm.exe. I imagine there could be several bugs causing this, not just one.

So I advice anyone who has this issue, see if "Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling" is enabled, and if it is, disable it, reboot, and see if the memory leak of dwm.exe goes away.

You can find the option if you go into Windows 10 settings -> system -> display -> scroll down to the end -> graphics options (last option on the page) -> https://i.imgur.com/6XlWKxO.png

Will test over the next days and report back if I still get a memory leak. So far, I didnt have any anymore since I deactivated it. And I tried a lot to reproduce it with countless videos playing both in Chrome, Firefox, triggering dGPU with gaming, put laptop to sleep while playing videos and so on.

Strangely, I dont have this option.. i just restarted windows because of new cumulative update, dwm.exe dropped from ~660MB to ~70MB..

win10 version is now 20H2 , 19042.870,  Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.551.0

Strangely, I dont have this option..

Like I said, the option is just there if the driver supports WDDM 2.4. So if you dont have a newer or latest Intel driver with device which supports it, the option is not there.

Still to memory leak anymore for me! The leak is totally gone since I deactivated Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.

You can also disable it via regedit:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers

dword32 "HwSchMode"

1 = disabled

2 = enabled

Option wont be there, again, if you dont use a WDDM 2.4 driver and at least 20H1.

Download latest from https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/30266/Intel-Graphics-Windows-10-DCH-Drivers and then see if the option is there, and toggle it on and OFF again reboot. 

Bad news sadly: My laptop was leaking memory again of dwm.exe process while I just had  2 video streams open and the memory was leaking around 2mb/s linear growing. I had woke up the laptop from hibernate that day, which is the first time I had used hibernate since the change of the gpu schedule option. So the issue sadly is not connected with the gpu schedule option it seems, but rather using hibernate maybe. I had a auto hibernate timer of around 10h set, so when I would wake up the laptop quicker, it wouldn't trigger hibernate. Someone maybe can confirm, who had the issue also used hibernate in between? Thats also maybe the reason why Intel couldn't reproduce it, because they never thought of using hibernate for the testing.

also if you are using "fast startup" that basically means it will use a "mini hibernate" (mini hibernate of kernel + drivers + system related stuff) each restart of windows, so if hibernate is indeed a root cause of this issue, it might trigger it too with "fast startup" activated.

you can deactivate hibernate, which then automatically turns off "fast startup" by opening a cmd.exe as administrator and type in: powercfg -h off

DWM.exe runs high (150MB) then start to jump up when I open Firefox browser and this only happen when I start up my PC from shutting it down then it run fine when I restart my PC like it's run at 15-30MB....I had version 27.20.100.9127 of the Intel UHD Graphics 630

After several days of just using hibernation at the end of day, dwm.exe is suddenly at 3.6GB of private data :D  Restarting now.. 

Intel is saying that they are aware of this issue and are tracking it internally. They are asking for memory dumps of dwm.exe to help them with debugging. So if you want to help, see this message for details:

https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/BUG-dwm-exe-uses-memory-leakage-with-Intel-HD-Graphics-630/m-p/1272388#M96122

Yes I've just seen the post and provided my dump files to the Intel moderator to forward to the debugging team for a closer look at it.

It's highly disappointing that no one official in Microsoft forums is actually responding, or at least looking at this matter.