Technology

Windows 10 Box Runtime Broker Memory Issue

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…

Photography, Technology

Upgrading Photo Drive

I take lots of photos, so I have a second hard disk in my main computer dedicated to photos and videos. The other day I noticed that the 2 TB drive was down to only 9 GB free! That was a shock, considering that’s well less than one 32 GB card in one of my DSLRs.

Upgrade time. I had to move those 189,330 files in 2,523 folders onto a larger drive.

I have plenty of drives around that I use for backup in a couple of HD “toasters” — USB 3 docks that you can hotswap SATA drives in and out of. So I popped a 3 TB drive into a dock, and copied all those files over to it.

That done, I opened up the tower computer, pulled the old 2 TB D: drive and installed the new 3 TB drive. I used the Disk Management tools to rename the new drive to D:, so that my photo programs find it.

Worked great, and I now have nearly a TB of free space.

I have two NAS (networked attached storage) devices but use them only for backup. I like having my photos on a secondary internal HD for fast access.

Streamkeeping, sustainability, community, business, photography, books, and animals, with occasional forays into social commentary. Text and Photos © Paul Cipywnyk