[Resolved] Memory leak in recent builds?

Prior to the most recent updates, GW2 tended to use about 2GB of memory. When clicking Exit to Desktop, it would close within seconds, and that was the end of it.

Since the latest patch(es), memory usage has increased, I have seen it at 4GB and continuing to climb (this is after a few hours of play). But I did not notice any corresponding increase in performance. Further, when exiting the game, the final frame remains on screen for an extended period of time - anywhere from 10s to over 30s, during which time the hard drive is very busy. Even after the window is closed, there remains a lengthy period of drive thrashing, which perfmon shows to be swap file operations (apparently Windows doing internal cleanup of memory that was not released by the game). Abnormal levels of drive thrashing can also be observed when alt-tabbing.

The oddity of this behavior combined with a lack of performance gains leads me to believe that there is a memory leak introduced in a recent build.

I notice nothing of that sort. Right now the game client has run for about 18 hours on this pc (I just went to char selection when going to sleep so total play time is like 10 of those 18 hours) and it shows 2.4gb ram usage. Also I never had the screen show 10s after choosing to exit, let alone 30s, not on this pc and not on any other PC in this house (which includes a core2duo with 4gb ram and 256MB passively cooled gfx card)...

I suspect the reason for the change on your own machine, especially when no other people report things that are VERY obvious changes like the game staying on screen for that long when exiting. There are too many possibilities to list here but do you have any "useful system care" software on your pc that performs "maintenance", updates drivers, "cleans" your pc or any of that nonsense? Any kind of software that does its own thing can cause problems that are hard to track, this includes auto-updates of all kinds.

I don't, and never have had, any of the OP's issues, as well. I play on an old potato.

No such issue here either and my game is usually running for many hours and I have the task manager opened most of the time.This is either a leaking driver on your system or some specific combination of driver and how GW2 uses specific features of that is triggering a bug somewhere.

Also need to be aware of anything that might be injecting itself into the GW2 process.

The usual way of "proving" a memory leak is to rule out all the other things it could be first. @Khisanth.2948 has mentioned a couple. There could be others too, including issues with RAM. My game runs at 3.5gb (I probably have more options up), but I have none of the other symptoms: it doesn't increase over time and it closes quickly and smoothly, no persisting window.

probably 3rd party software expanding the allotted memory for GW2 64 bit executable for some purposes. or not even expanding, but appending.

That might have been it, though I can't explain the cause. I had an old arcdps dll that had been disabled by renaming. Either the GW2 client recently started loading all dlls regardless of name, or it's been doing that all along but something in the newer build finally broke the old dll. In either case, I deleted the dll entirely and now it seems to be normal.