I've scoured the web, but I'm sick of reading "scan your computer for viruses" and "upgrade your RAM" on answers to similar questions to this. I understand that dwm.exe is for (simply put) caching bitmaps for things like Aero-peek and similar, but as far as I have read it shouldn't be using vast amounts of memory.
My colleague and I both have 4GB of RAM, Core 2 Duo, blah, blah -- essentially they're pretty capable. His dwm.exe is running at around 30mb, mine is currently running at about half a gig, though it does fluctuate quite a lot. This is the same while running the exact same applications (currently Zend studio, FireFox (with firemin - low memory usage), Outlook). Every so often I will get a notification asking me if I want to switch to Aero Basic because it's using too much memory, and sometimes it will just switch itself to basic and let me know why.
I know it's possible to stop it switching, but I want to know why it is using too much memory otherwise it's just papering over the cracks.
One thing to add is this seems to have started after a robbery on Monday, where two of my monitors were stolen, and I had to temporarily use a couple of alternative monitors. I am now using brand new monitors but the problem is the same. All drivers installed and working seemingly fine.
Any ideas why the usage is so high?
We are using windows 7 64-bit Professional.
Answer
The DWM.EXE process will consume a lot of memory when you have multiple screens and the system performance is set to the default of Let Windows choose what's best for my computer. To change this:
- Go to Computer -> Right click and choose Properties
- Select the Advanced tab
- Select the Settings button under the Performance section. This will popup the Performance Options window
- On the first tab is Visual Effects. Select
Adjust for best performanceorCustom(and select the feature(s) you want).
I chose Custom myself and selected only the Smooth edges of fonts to reduce memory usage from 534M to 6M with running 4 windows.
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