memory leak in vmconnect.exe ? (Win11 22H2, was not present in Win11)

Question

hi guys,

PC : MSI Z690-A DDR4 motherboard, latest bios, intel 12700, 4x 32GB RAM modules, 2TB SSD PNY CS3040, 43" HP z43 monitor 4K native resolution, no scaling. Integrated GPU only, latest Intel 770 driver (March2023), also tested with WHQL driver build 3626 or something like that (the one pushed by Windows Update, I was using exactly the same HW for months before the upgrade). Obviously has nothing to do with the problem, just mentioning for completness. Updated all drivers I could to latest versions (Realtek HD Audio, Intel chipset drivers, Intel 225 network, etc). I'm not using audio inside virtual machines. Win11 has been running fine for a year, I updated to WIn11 22H2 just days ago. SInce the update, I have problem : I'm using Hyper-V VMs via console connections. Linux Mint VMs have strange problem which was not there before updating to WIn11 22H2 : vmconnect.exe forever increasing memory usage, about 1GB RAM per each 5 seconds [!]. When I disconnect from LinuxMint VM, the memory clears up properly. Mint uses linux kernel 5.4.0.147, is fully updated, based on ubuntu 20.04.1 and the problem obviously has nothing to do with this. . Windows VMs do not exhibit this problem at all (Win10, Win 2019 Server, Win2022 Server). . 22H2 vmconnect.exe in c:\windows\system32 is 835,584 bytes, file version 10.0.22621.1. Is there anything newer ? old win11 installation used vmconnect.exe with the same size, but file version was 10.0.22000.1. This one worked perfectly, I never had this problem. . I replaced this exe file in 22H2 with the old version but the behavior is the same (replaced just this file, no additional libraries or anything else - is there something I should do to have "complete stack" ?). That makes me think it's not exactly the vmconnect.exe wha'ts CAUSING the problem, it might be just a victim of something in the background. There's almost nothing installed in the Win11, absolutely no huge applications, not even a MS Office - I like to keep host system as clean as possible and do all things in VMs due to separation and security. I have putty, Firefox, winrar, far manager and MS Teams installed on host. video here : https://youtu.be/vF6dN-qLF1I Been looking for a help, but couldn't find anything reasonable within a hour. Yes I know, I suck :) Any advice what to check, please ? I can use Sysinternals or similar debug tools according to instructions but I'm not coder. Big thanks in advance & Cheers ! edit : why the heck is the perfect formatting lost...

Answer 1

Hello there, Do you have any backup software agents on the host? I've seen these cause memory leaks. Memory leak can occur when you allocate some memory (with malloc in C) and you never free that memory, this can happen for a number of reasons. Now the important thing to understand is that this allocated memory will be released once the process is finished running. When you setup your VM you set the maximum amount of memory it can consume. When you shut down your VM it will also be released. You can't cause a "permanent" memory leakage if the program you write doesn't run. If the OS has some always running service with memory leak than it will slow down when it is out of memory but when you restart, all the memory will be released again. Hope this resolves your Query !! --If the reply is helpful, please Upvote and Accept it as an answer--

Answer 2

hi buddy, thanks for your reply - unfortunately no, it doesn't resolve my query. My apologies.

What you described is a definition of memory leak and of course, that is correct.

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There's no backup agent or backup software running neither on the host OS nor the guest OSes inside all VMs.

To add small detail : all VMs are configured to run with fixed memory, there's no Dynamic Memory at all.