WDFME.exe RAM hog

For What its worth…   Been using WDSmartware for a a year or so.    It kept my machine busy at times before.   I just updated it yesterday to version 1.5.1.6.    Its killing my machine now.   (win XP)    It seemed like it took for ever to finish the first backup with the new version.   After a reboot today, its been doing something to consume most of the resources for 4 hours.   I have selected backup when machine is idle.    Looks like it is finished now.   Got to go and do something before it fires up again!  

I have the high mem/cpu/disk usage problem. I am surprised a company the size of Western Digital doesn’t have (or hasn’t allocated) the resources to stop this problem in it’s tracks.

My stats:

Win 7 starter 32-bit (ASUS netbook)

2GB memory

My Book Live 2TB (firmware 2.10.09, SmartWare 1.5.1.6)

Issue:

I turned off all other applications to prove the point.

 

I bought the drive for the advertised features, one of which includes seamless backup. Furthermore, I don’t want to go through troubleshooting steps to make it work. That is Western Digital’s job. I hope a resolution is “on the way” and will be here soon.

Thanks in advance,

Charles

It seems the WDFME gives up the CPU well enough, but it uses all the real memory bumping other active program memory to disk cache. If there was a method to limit the memory used by this program from Hades I would go back to using it again. I run FreeFileSync in the middle of the night. That works well for desktops, but not so well for the laptops which sleep overnight. Is there maybe a register setting or ini file setting to limit RAM usage?

<>< Ron

ThePizzaMatrix H__onored Contributor? hoaxes!

It is very foolish to think that “give away” something because they are so altruistic.

It’s a business… Who are you kidding?.

If they put a piece of software is because they need it.

I have only WD products in my office and my home, and I have long followed the forum, do not see the interest in WD to fix the problem.

In desperation I tried to solve the problem using other software, but something happened to the unit, and does not access. I lost my valuable information.

I learned of the alliance of Segate and Samsung. In the office we decided to test also the chance of other products.
I’m sorry, I really loved WD, but we were disappointed.

Thanks Lucky_Phil

The command file to start and stop the WDFME process worked like a champ.

Sry but I win for having the bigger problem lol. This is a big problem! This is without the drive plugged in, latest version, and I have 4gb of Physical memory. The computer becomes unusable!!

Agreed. You have a much bigger problem. Your grammar and sentence forming is terrible.

Sorry to be rude but if I get a telling off for this comment, at least I’ll know someone from WD is actually reading this forum.

Thank god for this post! I thought my computer needed to be reimaged and was transferring all software to new PC as I type. I had installed the WD “Smart” ware on the pc over a year ago but never did backups and havent actually had the external drive hooked up to that computer for over a year, yet the WD software was running continuously using between 50-90% of my CPU and huge amounts of memory.

Its obvious WD doesnt care about fixing this. Uninstalled the software. Computer works fine now.

Never buying another WD device again.

Thanks to everyone who posted and thanks for nothing WD.

It’s all good. I was typing quickly to get the post out and wasn’t thinking much about grammar. I couldn’t solve this issue so I made myself a work around. I uninstalled the WD smartware software and started using windows backup to backup to my WD 1TB drive. I had one issue with this and that was I needed to turn off my AV to finish the backup without getting an error code with windows backup. Maybe I will come back and use WD smartware software if they ever fix it.

Once I uninstalled the WD Smartware software the computer was back running great.

You cant do anything on your machine if you have the WD software installed.

Peace

This seems to have brought down the CPU utilization mine was 36 percent just for this process now after disabling the VSS and restarting the WD engine it is almost zero.It spiked back to 50 percent after about 5 minutes but went down pretty soon. I will be monitoring this process for a few days.Also does disabling  the VSS process not cause any other problem.

  1. Is Bit Locker turned on?
  2. Are you backing up encrypted files/folders?
  3. Are you backing up compressed files/folders?
  4. Can you also collect the list of VSS providers that are installed on the systems and provide? From an administrative command prompt type:  vssadmin list providers
  5. Are your source partitions are Fat32, exFat, or external USB drives?'

As you can tell from my name, I’m neither a CompEng or Software writer:  I’m one of the ‘standard customers’ who wants their items to work right the first time.

  1.  Dunno.  Don’t care.  Shouldn’t matter if you did it right the first time.

  2. Yes  (in that I told it to back everything up).

  3. Yes (see #2 comment).

  4. Have no idea what this means.  I would guess that it is whatever the factory default is.

Running an HP with Vista64, Turion Dual Core XM Mobile RM-72 → 4GB, use Chrome for my browser, have updated to the latest version of WD (the installer says so) and Microsoft NET (and that’s about all I know about computers - these are regurgitated facts, I don’t really know what they mean).

Any time I boot up, WD takes up to 88% of the memory at any given time.

Yes, I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled it:  that helped the problem for about 20 minutes.

How come it is acceptable for the computing community (pointing an irritated finger at lots of firms here) to release what seems to be alpha or beta ware as finished product and expect it to be acceptable?

Shabs,

My understanding is that disabling the VSS will most likely mean you will lose your Windows restore points.

Particularly if you run defrag software like diskeeper.

With Diskeeper, you need to set the defrag options to VSS friendly in order to retain Windows restore points.

I am also having the memory issue.  I have a fairly new HP Pavilion quad core processor, 12 gig RAM, nothing encrypted, nothing compressed, I’m running Windows 7 Professional so bitlocker isn’t an option.  The  WDFME.exe on about a half dozen occasions in the last three weeks will consume all my memory.  I’m running version 1.5.1.6   -  If I stop the WDFME service my used memory goes from 95% used down to 22%.   It’s a pain in the neck when I’m not able to stop the service fast enough and it takes minutes to go from screen to screen.

fyi.  clicking  the SOFTWARE UPDATE button under HELP gives no indication of anything and doesn’t appear to do anything.  Next time my memory usage is rocketing towards 96% used I’ll take some screen shots. 

I have tried and tried and am not wasting anymore time on WD products, hardware is fine software is just junk. how can WD get it so wrong. nothing in support pages for this fault, only in the community.

i have just unistalled WD software and am going to find something else , what a joke for a such a large company.

If WD are not going to help the customers than why would i or all my community buy.???

I posted earlier in this thread ( http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-Smartware/WDFME-exe-RAM-hog/m-p/350367#M4409)..) I ended up buying a Mac which doesn’t need WDs software to backup. I guess this could be considered a fix.  An expensive fix. haha.

just an fyi - again I’m locked up.  10.2 gig of 12 total being used on WDFME.  Does this have something to do with Oracle Virtual Box at all?   Does anyone else here run virtual machines?

I’ll beat that!  10.2 gig used on WDFME

Installed the MyBookLive 02.10.12-129 : Core F/W firmware update today (the NAS automatically restarted as it should with the new firmware)

Rebooted the PC

Within 45 minutes the WDFME process was using 72% of my available RAM (8Gb - Win7 64bit Dell XPS 8300 i7 2600)

Had to stop the WDFME process so I could use my PC to work on…

When will a SmartWare / WDFME update be coming out?

This is intolerable and has been going on for over 9 months now

Please, please FIX this major issue

I had the same issue. WDFME would creep up its use of memory to the maximum memory available, then the system would slow down to a crawl.  I have 8G of RAM, Windows 7 (64)

Here is what I did. 

  1. Turn my virus protection OFF and stop the Smartware automatic back-up function.

  2. Disable all WD services. (3)

  3. Uninstall WD Smartware

  4. Restart the computer

  5. Download and install the latest Smartware version

  6. Restart the computer

  7. Enable the WD services if not enabled already.

  8. Restart the computer and turn the Virus protection back ON.

  9. Restart the WD Smartware automatic back-up function.

So far so good. …

Good luck.

Many thanks, Lucky_Phil. I followed the steps in your post and I’ve reclaimed control of my computer’s resources from wdfm.exe. Two additional icons on my desktop and manual starting and stopping of wdfm services has proved a better solution for me than simply uninstalling the software. I like the convenience of WD’s file backup. I still hope that WD might provide an update that solves the problem of resource-hogging. I can’t for the life of me understand why it is taking them so long.