@AFH Are you experiencing the same issue ever since moving to 1709? or you're saying that you've noticed this happening in previous builds as well?

use Windows Performance Toolkit and measure ReferenceSet and analyze it

@Samuel The anomaly starts as soon as you boot up, it usually takes around 48 hours to get to 5GB (Working Set).

@AFH I have 32GB of RAM so luckly nothing crashes, but around 7 days of uptime causes the system to become very slow and requires a restart.

@FrankThomas do you have a suggestion on how I should name my question to better reflect the meaning?

@magicandre1981 I would appriciate a more in-depth list of instructions on how to acheive my goal of finding the cause of the anomaly. Thank you!

the link explains everything. Win10 includes wpr.exe, open CMD.exe as admin, run this command wpr.exe -start ReferenceSet -filemode && timeout -1 && wpr.exe -stop C:\HighMemoryUsage.etl, wait 3 minutes to capture the memory usage grow, press a key to stop logging. Zip the large ETL file (+ NGENPDB folder) into 1 zip, upload the zip (OneDrive, dropbox, google drive) and post the share link here.

@HelpingHand Here is a OneDrive link to a folder with all the files - 1drv.ms/f/s!AoUGGsMzm_U8kmYhwRbTYrWuRXLE - I've refreshed the memory map 3 times so that you can see the changes, so far it seems the problem is with the Heap

it shows high heap usage. without callstacks of allocations from the ETL we can't help you

@magicandre1981 The ETL file is in the shared folder - 1drv.ms/f/s!AoUGGsMzm_U8kmYhwRbTYrWuRXLE - The recording includes 20min of usage starting from a fresh boot up. -- As soon as explorer.exe starts exceeding 100MB of RAM I'll record again and post it together with a fresh Process Explorer TXT and a Memory Map. Thank you so much for your help! I've learned quite a lot.

@magicandre1981 round-2 folder includes the new explorer.exe txt, memory map and the ETL all from a single session with the anomaly happening.

the grow is very low in the trace. from what I see the Explorer allocates memory while trying to start programs (shell32.dll!HDXA_LetHandlerProcessCommandEx, windows.storage.dll!CBindAndInvokeStaticVerb::_TryExecuteCom‌​mandHandler, shell32.dll!COpenDefaultLocationCommand::Execute) and querying ContextMenus (shell32.dll!CRegistryVerbsContextMenu::QueryContextMenu) which results in searches to Windows Search (StructuredQuery.dll!StructuredQuery1::CStructuredQueryHelpe‌​r::ParseStructured‌​Qu‌​ery, StructuredQuery.dll!StructuredQuery1::LoadSchemaBinaryFromFi‌​le) and this causes allocations.

StructuredQuery.dll!SemanticsUM::SchemaBinary::Load, StructuredQuery.dll!operator new. And the new operator does the HEap allocations. how large is the search index? try to rebuild it.

I think I know what is happening... I've removed Internet Explorer from the machine, and now looking at Indexing Options I see there is an issue with an unavailable location... see here: imgur.com/lXegpg3

"csc" is offline files. do you use them?

The problem is that even tho I unchecked that selectbox it keeps re-appearing

And nope

Actually, I've checked the Sync Center now and they are turned off

imgur.com/a/EERO9

I've just tried turning them on and then trying to de-select that folder but it didn't help. I'll turn them off, restart and see if it changes anything. brb

I'll monitor the memory map to see if it solved the issue :-) Thanks a lot for the help! Do you mind explaining how did you use the ETL file to get to that conclusion?