INFO: Process audiodg.exe Consumes High Memory

A recent not-so-good experience led me to write about it.. Have you ever been in the "flow" and so absorbed in your work that when you get interrupted, you find it very difficult to get back to where you were at? I recently had that, and the disruption came from a technology failure, not a human interaction. I will get to the details next.

I was working on a large dataset in my notebook and all of a sudden I got an OOM notification (out of memory). The prompt was similar to "Your computer is running low on memory".. I could not get a screenshot of the error as I could not do anything more after that and was forced to press the power button long enough to restart.

After reboot, I tried to replicate what I was doing previously and launched the Task Manager to see if it has clues to the issue. What I saw almost pushed me off my chair. The executable audiodg.exe consumed 1.3GB of memory!

Although I have 16GB of memory to play with, I knew something is not right. Now that I was able to take a screenshot to share, you will find it below. It shows a third of system memory already consumed.

The executable audiodg.exe is an integral part of the Windows 7 Operating System. It is the "Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation" and if you terminate the process you lose audio output on your notebook, as in my experience.

Given my encounter with low memory and eventual unresponsive system, I would not want to experience that same scenario again and need to resolve it as much as I can. So I tried several suggestions from the web -- check for virus, check the digital signature of the file, etc.. And soon enough a solution was found.

It is worth noting that even on a fresh reboot, the process audiodg.exe still consumes about the same amount of memory. So memory leaking was scratched out as a possible suspect.

The culprit was installing an updated driver to the audio card of my notebook. After rollback to the previous driver, the problem went away. So I have this advise to folks out there who follow my posts: If you have a software running on your system that watches out for outdated drivers and you get notified each time a version is available, throw it away. Uninstall it, as it is useless. Just replace the driver if it causes you problems, otherwise things run fine and there is no need to update.

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This would sound like a cliche, but "if it ain't broken, don't fix it!" Trust me, there is truth to this advise. With that, let me leave you this question: How much memory does audiodg.exe consume on your computer?