W10 Explorer is experiencing a memory leak, and I'm not sure if Open-Shell is the culprit.

[XanthosGambit]

If I leave my PC running and not doing anything more demanding than running a screensaver, I can come back 8 hours later and find that explorer.exe is using 12-18 GB of system memory. Frankly that seems ridiculous. I figure I'd ask here since Open-Shell directly modifies the Windows 10 GUI and associated processes, but if Open-Shell isn't the culprit, hopefully someone can help me track it down. And I know it basically means nothing, but I've got another computer running Open-Shell that's never experienced this. Maybe I'm cursed or something. Here's my current W10 info:

• Edition: Windows 10 Pro
• Version: 22H2
• Installed on: 1/‎28/‎2022
• OS build: 19045.2251
• Experience: Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.4180.0

[ge0rdi]

I'm not sure if Open-Shell is the culprit

Try to uninstall Open-Shell, reboot and check if you can replicate big memory usage.

[XanthosGambit]

It's started doing it again.

[ge0rdi]

Do you know what triggered it?
Can you replicate it in reasonable time (I mean like not waiting for 3 days to the issue to occur)?

Also, maybe you can uninstall Open-Shell again and then use your machine without it for several days.
Since the leak occurred after several days, it is still not clear whether it is Open-Shell related or not.

[XanthosGambit]

It actually only takes a couple hours of just using the computer for it to happen, I just haven't bothered keeping a close eye on it. And I don't have a clue what triggers it.

[ge0rdi]

You can try to obtain heap ETW trace following these steps (all commands have to be done in administrator console):

• Run wpr -HeapTracingConfig explorer.exe enable
• Restart Explorer (or whole machine)
• Wait until the leak starts to manifest
• Run wpr -start Heap -filemode
• Use your machine normally for couple of minutes (but not for too long because the log will get big)
• Run wpr -stop heap.etl
• This will create ETW log in heap.etl file
• Upload the log somewhere (Google drive, etc)
• Send me a private link to it to ge0rdi (at) gmx.com (I'd not recommend sharing it publicly as it may contain sensitive information)

I'll try to figure out something from it.

[XanthosGambit]

Okay, I sent you an email.