Desktop Windows Manager using extremely high amounts of gpu, cpu, and ram.

[thedonquixotic]

I have a Surface Book 2. It's pretty powerful, at least by my standards.

I've also heavily modded my shell using things like 3rd party themes (no longer supported by Windows. You have to patch some reg files to get access to theme stuff like Windows 7/XP had).

I've noticed a bunch of high number on dwm.exe lately. Could these be related? From what I've asked of people who are more knowledgable on this subject, it shouldn't. It's just a simple change in some assets that Windows uses for theming. It's not running any additional processes, it's just forcing Windows to accept theme files that it already had built in support for.

But yet, I'm still getting some crazy high gpu, cpu, and memory usage. I have no clue way. Any thoughts? How could I better diagnose this problem? Is there anyway to see what exactly dwm.exe is actually doing, like what processes or services it's running?

 

[Colif]

Some GPU usage makes sense given what Windows Desktop Manager does.. it runs the desktop.

tried updating GPU drivers?

this might help you figure out whats using dwm - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/vmmap

have you run AV/malware scans?

some ideas in here: https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1353916-dwmexe-memory-usage-windows-10-16299192-anyone-else/