Windows 10 thumbcache.dll on my windows 10 machine memory usage out of sight

  • Thread starter Thread starter T R Berta
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T R Berta

On my Windows 10 desktop machine, there are several instances of dllhost.exe running. Only one has a memory issue. According to my Process Explorer display it is the one running thumbcache.dll. It is common within a few days of rebooting my machine for the "Working Set" measurement to top 10-12 Gb, and the "Private Bytes" measurement to top 4-5Gb. A few days ago this dll hit a record Working Set of over 23Gb (Process Explorer shows it as 23,000,000 K).


If I open a directory with lots of photos or videos, I can watch Process Explorer and observe the memory usage pop up for that process. When I close File Explorer, the usage never goes down. Clearly there's a background process that uses thumbcache.dll because occasionally its memory usage will explode overnight.


I've looked at my thumbcache*.db files in C:\Users\%my user name%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer, but all of them are in the 0-5 Mb range. Nothing exessive.


I can kill that instance of dllhost,.exe and the system will restart it small and begin building excessive levels of memory usage all over again. Rebooting has the same effect of course. This is a fairly recent development (in the last six months or so).


I've searched the forums and see a lot of generic information about dllhost, but none if it helpful, and almost none of it current and nothing specifically related to thumbcache.dll


It genuinely looks like some kind of garbage collection issue or a memory leak but that's just guesswork.


I realize I'm quoting "virtual" memory measurements, but eventually it uses up all the physical memory on my 8Gb machine. Then it starts to slow things down.


Does anyone have any hard information about problems with thumbcache.dll?

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