Lately I have been suffering from a slow memory leak which would, over a period of about 12-13 days, cause my system to start running low on memory. I first noticed this when after an expanded period of up-time my system started complaining that it needed to shutdown applications in order to recover memory for a new application to be able to start. I then noticed that between 12 and 13 GB of memory was being used.
After a reboot my system would be nice and responsive again with a minimal use of memory (about 3 GB). But after the aforementioned period it would again start complaining about insufficient memory!
After looking around for tools and tips to help me track down the root cause of this issue, I found a short text which pointed me towards Process Explorer and keeping an eye on the Private Bytes column of processes to keep track of how much physical memory processes are using.
Currently I’m at 6 days of monitoring and during that time I’ve seen the Private Bytes section of cmdagent.exe slowly rise. It’s currently at 2358048 KB of memory and steadily rising (virtual bytes is even higher at 2675728 KB).
The system is currently telling me that 9815 MB in total is in use, the other high ranking processes are well below 1 GB in the private bytes column and can all be exitted in order to free up their used memory, whereas cmdagent can’t!
Is cmd agent slowly leaking memory (or at least not releasing it in a timely fashion) or is this intended behavior?
I’m running CIS version 8.1.0.4426 (just the firewall and HIPS+, no antivirus) on a up to date Windows 7 x64 system with 16 GB of RAM.