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I fresh reinstalled Windows 11 a couple months back, and for a while now it seems like there's some sort of memory leak (?) that causes high CPU usage by the "System" process, high memory usage, and the occasional audible system stutter. Restarting fixes it for a time, but it eventually happens again.

Pics of task manager and resource monitor with my "usual set" of applications open. Vivaldi watching YT, Chrome open with work stuff, spotify, discord, obsidian, steam. I'm not entirely sure why VmmemWSL is there as I had just shut down wsl, but may not be relevant.

Process Explorer shows CcUnpinRepinnedBcb+0x370 as the primary CPU consumer for the system process.

This is my PC. TL;DR, Ryzen 9 7900x, 96GB DDR5-6400, NVME boot drive, 4070ti.

Some potentially related notes:

  • I use WSL (v2) and docker desktop frequently; I set WSL's memory limit to 32GB. WSL's memory doesn't seem to free itself correctly (I'll end up with ~16-20GB used even after shutting down all containers/processes), but wsl --shutdown solves that.
  • I use Windows' multiple desktop feature and switch back and forth a lot
  • The "System" CPU usage seems to significantly increase when there's something that actually should be using the CPU going on (eg: in a game, slicing a 3d model, rendering something), and does seem to affect performance.
  • I have 4 monitors connected. One 2560x1440@144hz connected to the NVIDIA gpu, 2 1920x1080@75hz and 1 2560x1600@60hz connected to the Ryzen iGPU (all USB C)
  • I have a lot of devices plugged in. Mic, headphone dac/amp, speakers, webcam, mouse, kb/m, controller, stream deck, etc. Every USB port on the back of my mobo is used, along with 2 from a USB 3 card.
  • I also had an Elgato 4k60pro mk.2 installed, but removed it to see if it helped (it did not).

Any ideas, or other things I should check?

I've already run Win. defender and Malware bytes scans, and nothing came up.

I'm aware "free memory is wasted memory", however this seems like a bit much, and the CPU usage is also concerning.

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  • Run Windows Tools, Resource Monitor for 15 - 30 minutes. Look in the CPU tab and see what is using CPU. Also look in the Memory tab and see what is using Memory.
    – anon
    Commented Apr 2 at 21:49
  • hm I also have a ryzen system (7840u) and use WSL quite a bit, and have this issue. Seems to crop up after some time, not as a result of a specific thing I can track down. A reboot fixes it temporarily. Process Explorer shows the same thing for me under ntoskrnl. This post and another which mentions a different ryzen 7000 series chip makes me wonder if it's something related to amd drivers.. I've updated all my drivers and done a clean install and still see the same behaviour. Very frustrating and difficult to track down
    – John
    Commented Apr 25 at 22:32
  • Is this a Razer device? I'm experiencing the exact same issues, and I suspected the Razer software... But can't seem to find a solution either.
    – Rody
    Commented May 10 at 7:38
  • @John I'm almost certain it's due to wsl2 at this point. I haven't used it on this computer for a couple weeks now (unrelated reasons), and haven't seen this issue come up since.
    – wolfinabox
    Commented May 11 at 15:03
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    @John - As far as as I can tell, moderators seem to keep deleting answers to the various questions about this as duplicates, since there are multiple related questions on StackExchange but they all have the same answer. Not sure if this comment will be deleted, too, but the answer to this problem can definitely be found in this post--it's a bug in recent versions of the AMD Radeon GPU driver for the CPU's integrated GPU.
    – JohnSpeeks
    Commented Jun 16 at 19:06

1 Answer 1

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This appears to be caused by a bug in recent versions (24.x) of the AMD Radeon GPU Driver for integrated GPUs built into recent AMD CPUs.

This driver causes thousands of zombie processes and leaked memory. Full details and the solution is given in that link, but here is an abbreviated version.

There are two possible solutions depending on if you need that GPU:

  1. If you are not using the integrated GPU, the best option is to disable it in your BIOS (that will be an option called something like "Integrated Graphics" which you'd change from "UMA Auto" to "Disabled") and then uninstall the related AMD drivers using the official AMD Cleanup Utility. This will ensure the drivers aren't automatically reinstalled.

  2. If you are using the integrated GPU, you will need to either revert the drivers to a version that doesn't have this problem, such as 23.10, or wait until a version that fixes this bug is released. If you revert, be sure to disable any automatic updates.

In my case, on a desktop system with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU and an external NVIDIA GPU, disabling the integrated GPU in my BIOS and then cleaning up the drivers (finally) solved this problem. It had been an issue for many, many months and was incredibly frustrating.

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  • Please do not post the same answer to multiple questions. If the same information really answers both questions, then one question (usually the newer one) should be closed as a duplicate of the other. You can indicate this by voting to close it as a duplicate or, if you don't have enough reputation for that, raise a flag to indicate that it's a duplicate. Otherwise tailor your answer to this question and don't just paste the same answer in multiple places.
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Commented Jun 16 at 18:32
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    @DavidPostill The questions are different though, which in the past has been what matters, even if the answers are the same or similar.
    – Brad
    Commented Jun 19 at 22:28

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