I've been through the ringer for months, reading documentation, forums, asking for help. I've never been able to solve it. I even turned to Ai for just a glimmer of hope.
Windows 11 paged pool never comes back down. Only a reboot frees it.
Task Manager → Memory → Paged pool. After reboot it's 300 MB. If I use the PC it jumps in stairs and sticks. Last measured boot: 300 MB in the morning, 900+ MB by evening. Close Discord, RuneLite, Firefox, Explorer — the number does not drop. Leave it long enough and the box runs out of memory and locks up. This is kernel paged pool, not Chrome.
Two other PCs in the house do the same kind of work (Discord / RuneLite / Firefox). They sit at 450–550 MB paged for days, sometimes a month. Same apps. Dont understand why..
Pool tags that grow and never free: FMfn, MmSt, NtfF/Ntff (paged). FMsl and File stay up on the nonpaged side. One snapshot at 8 hours: FMfn 123 MB with ~249k outstanding name-cache nodes (1.42M allocs vs 1.17M frees). fltmc is Microsoft-only (WdFilter, FileInfo, CldFlt, bindflt, bfs, …). No third-party minifilter required.
Already ruled out:
- Clean install with only Discord + RuneLite — still grew
- Windows 11 23H2 and earlier 11 on this same PC — still grew
- Defender real-time off — the huge scan spikes stopped, the slow climb did not
- wcifs disabled at boot — overnight idle went flat; daytime use still stairs
- Driver Verifier pool tracking on fltmgr, Ntfs, WdFilter: those .sys files' own paged bytes barely moved while FMfn grew tens of MB
So this is Filter Manager's filename cache / NTFS stream objects not getting torn down. Not "WdFilter leaking 200 MB of its own pool." Idle does not free it. Closing files does not free it. Reboot does.
I don't want to "reboot more" or "it's a cache until memory pressure." Pressure happened. The session still died. Other house PCs with the same apps never do this.
Put some extra details in a text doc, not sure if it helps. I'm so beyond my skillset at this point.
Windows 11 paged pool never comes back down. Only a reboot frees it.
Task Manager → Memory → Paged pool. After reboot it's 300 MB. If I use the PC it jumps in stairs and sticks. Last measured boot: 300 MB in the morning, 900+ MB by evening. Close Discord, RuneLite, Firefox, Explorer — the number does not drop. Leave it long enough and the box runs out of memory and locks up. This is kernel paged pool, not Chrome.
Two other PCs in the house do the same kind of work (Discord / RuneLite / Firefox). They sit at 450–550 MB paged for days, sometimes a month. Same apps. Dont understand why..
Pool tags that grow and never free: FMfn, MmSt, NtfF/Ntff (paged). FMsl and File stay up on the nonpaged side. One snapshot at 8 hours: FMfn 123 MB with ~249k outstanding name-cache nodes (1.42M allocs vs 1.17M frees). fltmc is Microsoft-only (WdFilter, FileInfo, CldFlt, bindflt, bfs, …). No third-party minifilter required.
Already ruled out:
- Clean install with only Discord + RuneLite — still grew
- Windows 11 23H2 and earlier 11 on this same PC — still grew
- Defender real-time off — the huge scan spikes stopped, the slow climb did not
- wcifs disabled at boot — overnight idle went flat; daytime use still stairs
- Driver Verifier pool tracking on fltmgr, Ntfs, WdFilter: those .sys files' own paged bytes barely moved while FMfn grew tens of MB
So this is Filter Manager's filename cache / NTFS stream objects not getting torn down. Not "WdFilter leaking 200 MB of its own pool." Idle does not free it. Closing files does not free it. Reboot does.
I don't want to "reboot more" or "it's a cache until memory pressure." Pressure happened. The session still died. Other house PCs with the same apps never do this.
Put some extra details in a text doc, not sure if it helps. I'm so beyond my skillset at this point.
- Windows Build/Version
- 25H2
My Computer
At a glance
Win 11
- OS
- Win 11
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
