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. Task Manager will show 45+gb of paged and non paged pool, but sometimes can take a really long time to get there. This is kernel paged pool, not Chrome. Happens without a web browser even open.
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. Not finding an attach button D:
I've tried old and dated firmware \ drivers for my hardware, and the absolute latest. That didn't do anything.
Windows Build/Version 25H2