Bitdefender IS 27.0.16.86 on Windows 11: high mem usage after a couple of hours

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/comment/327127#Comment_327127

Hi @Scott ,

your experience is more than welcome :) Consider that I've got 32gb of RAM, this could make bdservicehost eventually more aggressive in terms of caching strategy. I've got a look at the troubleshooting page but there's nothing more I can do to prevent memory usage.

BTW when starting the system, bdservicehost has a low memory impact. Opening Firefox with a few tabs makes a stable increase in memory consumption. Closing Firefox will not give back the memory previously allocated.

I think I will open a support ticket soon.

Thanks a lot,

Simone

DadDna

Hey Simone,

Sounds like you might have the same issue I am currently experiencing. I have a Win 11 laptop using BitDefender Total Security with 64 gb of RAM. Upon boot up bdservicehost.exe will start out consuming around 400 mb then steadily grow to over 25 gb. If I leave the computer running it will eventually lock up/blue screen within the day. Restarting the PC will start the process over again at around 400 mb and seems to be the only way to get the memory back. As this is happening, the available physical memory will decrease at a similar pace. This will then be reflected in bdservicehost showing it is using 40% of available memory at 16,400 mb of usage (as an example). I had tried every tip I could find online (including clean uninstall and reinstall multiple times) with no success. I finally contacted bitdefender support in July and they had me run some logs and tests. Here is the response I received on July 26th from support...

"I have looked into the case and it seems that the situation is caused by an issue that has already been acknowledged by our development team.

We are currently working on a fix that will be done by means of an automatic update and won't require any additional action on your end.

I will get back to you with an update regarding the fix as soon as we have one."

So far I have heard crickets! I still have the issue and have to restart several times a day or just shut down and not use that pc. Unfortunately, I have already renewed my Bit Defender for this year, but it may be my last. I continue to hope for a resolution before I have to switch security suites.

DadDna

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/comment/327685#Comment_327685

Hey Dadna,

I've read your post....I've never experienced a so high memory usage /you've reached 25GB of mem allocation fro bdservicehost...really????)...I've reached 800mb of ram for bdservicehost at worst.

Support asked me to uninstall BD with a specific uninstall tool covering version 2023 and then to reinstall latest version downloading file from BD Central site.

As you can expect nothing changed...at least since a few days where I found BD finally releasing memory with a strategy yet to be understood....but I can now see bdservicehost even 350MB after hours of activities with my desktop PC, eventually reaching 600MB or a few more.

I think they are now testing some optimization to their engine...it's clear that they have some memory leaks or issues on some configuration that needs to be fixed.

Let's see what happens

Simone

MrITGuy47

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/comment/327685#Comment_327685

I am experiencing the same exact issue. Just reached out to support, and awaiting a response.

jayjayuk

We are using the gravity zone version and have been experiencing this for over a week, it runs the PC out of memory and it grinds to a halt. It is so frustrating that it is taking this long for a resolution. I finally put in a ticket on the 22nd.

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/comment/327904#Comment_327904

Can't say that I'm reaching 25GB of mem from bdservicehost....but again I start from 380MB and yesterday after a couple of hours I reached 890MB....closing Firefox and all the other apps do nothing...bitdefender do not de allocate memory (allocated for example at the first Firefox start to enable its protection).

Hope they will investigate further. Your issue is bigger than mine (25GB allocated could be a serious issue): they should definitively fix this bug (no, we can't consider this an optimization issue at all).

Simone

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/comment/327904#Comment_327904

Have they fixed the bug since your last msg here @jayjayuk ?

Same issue started for me today. The bitdefender service starts out after bootup at 380-400 MB. Slowly but surely it creeps up to consume all available RAM. Then my system freezes up and needs a hard reset.

Already tried clean reinstall, didn't improve the situation.

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/87461/

Hi @cainet,

Have you already tried the steps suggested in this article?

Regards

DadDna

Still no fix for this issue! :(

I did just receive an update from support that they are still working on it, but no expected timeline.

I have several PCs on Bitdefender and fortunately only one has this issue. However, rebooting that PC every couple of hours just isn't sustainable. I am currently considering other, inexpensive security solutions, so that I can uninstall Bitdefender on this computer until there is a fix available. Anyone have some suggestions?

Thanks.

professor24

Bumping. I'm experiencing the same issue, with the exact pathology. If left to its own devices, the rate of consumption of memory by bdservicehost compunds. Even as applications (Firefox, etc) are closed, there is no release of memory. I have 32GB of RAM and typically restart the computer once bdservicehost is consuming 4GB.

I am very hopeful that a release is forthcoming to address this known and debilitating issue.

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/87461/

Hello @professor24 and thanks for joining us here and for sharing your experience.

I think it would be best to contact the Support engineers to solve this. It's true that this behavior has been reported on several occasions in the past and for this reason, a support article containing suggestions to reduce CPU and disk usage was made available. But as @DadDna pointed above, he owns several PCs on Bitdefender and only one has this issue, so there has to be something specific that causes it, because the normal memory usage for bdservicehost is around 500 MB, as explained in this article:

You can get in touch with the Support engineers by choosing one of the contact channels available here:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/help/

Let us know how it goes.

Regards,

Alex

Stamp

Joining in, pretty bad. Went to have dinner with a normally working computer, idle with no extra loads, came back with all 32 gb of ram used. 20 of them by BitDefender....

Right now it seems to have chilled quite a bit (after a few reboots) and it's just between 4-5 gb. But on the other hand it's eating a third of my cpu by upsetting WMI Provider Host and AIDA64, so that's nice.

Current system uptime is 1 hour 47 minutes. SFC found nothing, let's see if DSIM helps.

Edit: DISM found nothing wrong, but I now can offer the value of 5 minutes to reach 1 gb (tested over a couple of reboots) and in less than two hours I’m back to over 18 gb.

Stamp

Can't edit anymore, here's an update: it's now at 23.5 but that's not as bad as it looks. Yeah. C: is a dozen gb fuller than it should, so out of 32 gb of system memory it went and ate roughly 35.

How about reverting back this absolute train wreck of an update? I'd uninstall the whole thing but I don't want to lose my lengthy list of exceptions.

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/comment/328189#Comment_328189

@Alexandru_BD Hi! Yes, I have tried sfc -scannow as admin, I have tried clean reinstall, tried updating Bitdefender, I have no other security software on the machine, it is not performing an active system scan while it gobbles up the memory, I have opened a case with Support, received the copy-paste default answer. It has been over a month and I haven't heard back anything. My system has 32GB of dedicated ram and BD ends up eating it all up, to the point, that the OS crashes.

After just 20 minutes of system up time, RAM usage went from 400MB to 700MB and it never stops.

I haven't been able to use my computer they way I want for over a month now because of this.

Now it is at 2.9GB after 3 hours of uptime

5.9GB after 4 hours

EricC

mine started doing the same thing about 4 days ago. Version 27.0.20.105. Notice my system was rebooted each morning and event log says bdservicehost ran out of ram. then system reboot. I have uninstalled and reinstalled and within an hour it has consumed 8GB and still climbing. I disabled active protection but made no difference. I have 3 systems now that are doing this.

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/comment/329068#Comment_329068

This is a HUGE amount of memory! When I started this thread it was about memory occupation of the same process you are reporting: mine goes from 400MB to 800MB in the worst case....never seen 1GB or more. I really think that there are some specific issues on machines like yours. Maybe you've got in common a device driver or a particular software configuration that make the Virus Shield behave in this way. Open a support ticket if you've not done already. They will ask you to run a special tool that extract info on your actual Windows and Bitdefender installation. Dev team needs to reproduce the issue to understand what make this strange behaviour happen. Let's hope they will troubleshoot soon.

Simone

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/comment/329144#Comment_329144

Yes @Spulci, thank you for bringing this up.

To everyone encountering this memory consumption, keep in mind that in such scenarios the context is very important and there is a checklist that should be followed during troubleshooting. For this reason, we cannot pronounce ourselves in the community and elaborate on our solutions, because apart from the basic remediation steps that we can provide, such reports require a case-by-case investigation.

I'll give you two very recent examples, out of the similar reports collected by the Support teams.

One user mentioned that the issue disappears when turning off Bitdefender Anti-Tracker Chrome extension. Whenever he turns it back on, the issue reappears.

Another user told our engineers that the issue disappears while the device is disconnected from the internet. The issue turned out to be related to a Realtek network card driver. Installing the latest driver immediately rectified the issue.

And there are really more cases that show us the importance of the device status, running apps, drivers, updates, usage scenario, clogged or misconfigured devices and the list goes on. Whenever there's a conjunction between the aforementioned and the antivirus, the general impression is that the antivirus is the culprit, but there's always a number of factors that may lead to this high resource consumption, not JUST the antivirus itself.

The below article may be a good starting point and can guide you through the basic troubleshooting steps, but if the behavior doesn't improve, the engineers can use the logs to find the root cause.

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/87461/

My recommendation in this situation is to reach out to the Bitdefender engineers so they can locate the source of consumption and advise further, because each use case might have a different trigger.

Regards,

Alex

TheMcIntoshMan

We started experiencing this issue as well on Oct 26. BDservicehost racks up the memory until the machine crashes after a few hours. (see example screencap at 9.7GB). It appears that this might be related to a recent Windows 10 update as the issues start happening on each respective machine following this update: KB5031904 Cumulative Update Preview for .NET Framework 3.5, 4.8 and 4.8.1 for Windows 10 Version 22H2

The Windows update could just be coincidence but we have otherwise not made any changes to any of our workstations here.