Memory leak Workstation Pro 15.0.1

[KelvinBailey]

Anyone else experiencing what appears to be a memory leak using Workstation 15.0.1? Windows 10 1809 host.

If I power up a VM (doesn't matter what OS or configured VM memory size), non-paged pool immediately jumps up a GB or so. Power down the VM and completely close Workstation and the non-paged pool stays the same. Eventually host RAM is exhausted and host Windows becomes essentially unusable requiring a hard reset.

I've tried this with VMs with very little virtual hardware (no virtual NIC, USB, 3d acceleration, printers etc) with the same results.

[KelvinBailey]

Not fixed in 15.0.2

Tried replacing physical network card (realtek, completely uninstalled driver afterward) with an Intel NIC as google suggested bad drivers as most likely cause.

[KelvinBailey]

The same VMs are running fine using the bundled VMware Workstation 15 Player. At least, so far... The non-paged pool is not constantly growing like it does when using full Workstation.

[KelvinBailey · Accepted solution]

Well... Figured this one out. Nothing to do with VMware. Problem was the drive hosting the VMs was formatted with REFS. Once I moved the VMs to a NTFS formatted drive the memory leak went away. Anyway, leaving this here in case it helps someone in the future.