My Windows 10 tower computer was feeling sluggish, and the HD light was indicating constant disk activity. New browser windows were very slow to open, and even the keyboard was noticeably slow to respond.

I fired up Task Manager (Control-Alt-Delete then click Task Manager) to see what was using the most CPU and memory.

I saw that a Windows process called Runtime Broker was using a whopping 9 GB of my 16 GB of memory, and that figure kept steadily rising.  A little poking around online showed that this process controls Windows Apps and Tiles. I don’t use any Tiles. Some sites also said there was a known memory leak associated with Runtime Broker.

Some sites suggested going to Windows > Settings > System > Notifications & actions, and turning off “Show me tips about Windows.” I tried that, rebooted, and Runtime Broker still began steadily gobbling up more and more memory.

I went back to Notifications & actions and turned off all Notifications. Rebooted, and Runtime Broker has been holding steady at about 0% of CPU and 5.7 MB of memory used.

My machine feels snappy again, with new browser windows popping and the keyboard response back to normal.

So far I haven’t run into any functionality issues by turning all Notifications off, but I hope MS fixes this, because it would be nice to have some of them back.

UPDATE: Runtime Broker is now restarting itself, gradually eating up memory, shutting itself down, restarting itself…. Crazy. But at least the memory used values seem to top out at under a GB before it shuts down and restarts.

UPDATE: Seems to have settled down now…

UPDATE (12/24): Nope, has not settled down. Sigh…