I've seen similar posts like this before and I didn't mind them until I have finally confirmed this was my case as well.
I have a really beefy computer so i'm sure it's not my hardware issue.
I do have 3 displays (24" LCD x 3)
What happens to me is that, at first booth my PC is super quick. I take screenshots (custom region) a lot, nature of my work, and everything is snappy. But over the course of hours I will notice my PC slowing down, windows are getting more and more laggy, will notice screenshots taking a bit slower to aquire (like minimal but i know it aint snappy as it should) etc

I notice lots of apps/windows become sluggish (telegram, skype, etc) like they get all sticky and not snappy.

I've always thought something in my PC was causing it but nothing out of the ordinary on the resource manager.

So I have no choice but to reboot. After reboot all is well, until a few hours later.
TODAY I decided to reboot PC and not turn on Display Fusion... Many hours of working I can already say my PC has not lagged one bit!! I do the same thing day in and day out and the only difference today is that DISPLAY FUSION is OFF!
Wow.. all this time it was DF causing my PC slow down!
I've got the latest DF version installed.
I love DF (paid for it) and it's painful not to have it.
Has anyone ever figured this out yet?
Regards

Hello, I have a similar behavior. I normally use to open one session of AutoCAD, two sessions of 3dsMAX and photoshop. Under Windows 7 there was now slow down by opening lots of windows. But under Win10/64 it slows down. I really have good hardware. I´ve seen that DisplayFusion is not the only cause that slows the computer down. But if I exit DisplayFusion the reactivity is quicker. I think, that Windows itself cause the majority of the problem. After restart the computer all is fine until I work with the above mentioned programs.

Hello Owen, here is my file. Zhank you very much for your support.

No, DisplayFusion needs about 1% CPU-load and about 140 MB RAM. The thing is, that the processor load is always very low and also the CPU temperature is normal. RAM is used max. 16GB of 64GB. But if there are many windows open the time for doing things inside the progamms become slower and slower. I have opened much more windows than usual and so I saw, the DisplayFusion is not part of the problem. Because if shut it down the PC is slow after that too. Inbetween I installed the latest BIOS and Chipset drivers with no success. As I know other users, who say, that they didn´t have this problem it seems to be a problem with my system configuration. I will search further....

I am experiencing the same thing. Somehow I feel like displayfussion is slowing down my PC due to all the triggers I have. However I don't see it using much memory but my PC responsiveness has gone down significantly after implementing some.

I am experiencing severe slowdowns (mostly my mouse moving very slowely) when dragging windows or opening new ones. The task manager indicates that DisplayFussion is using a low amount of CPU and RAM (it could take plenty more). The issues remind me of memory leaks.

I urge the users on this thread that have slowness issues to download Microsoft Sysinternal tool called EDIT:20240605 PROCESS MONITOR, NOT PROCESS EXPLORER. Run it and filter on all active DisplayFusion processes and have it track all Registry and File activity. Run some few minutes while doing things on your PC and then save the captured results off to a native file type, zip if up and send to BF for review. There is no hope of reasonable performance until they reduce polling to an absolute minimum, and make sure that whatever frameworks/modules they are using stop needless hammering of registry/file systems. These captures will show those in stark relief.

I will run a procmon, but I wanted to share that it is possible that DF service is leaking handles. On my current system which has been running for 5 days without a reboot DF now has over 100,000 handles open. This is more than any other application and is 20% of all handles on the system.

It is also worth noting that the CPU counter in the details tab is incorrect inside taskmgr. You have to look in the processes view to see the real CPU usage.

I've just exported the troubleshooting information and it is interesting that it thinks it has < 2,500 handles including GUI, file etc while Taskmanager shows virtual memory use of 3.3GB and 113,242 handles.

I purchased DisplayFusion in May 2023, primarily because I wanted to cycle wallpaper on a third monitor. Soon after, I noticed that Photoshop (CS6) was taking a very long time to open. During startup, the "Reading Preferences" screen seemed to take about 10x longer than normal. I thought there might be a problem with my C: drive, but I could find no evidence of that. I upgraded to a fast SSD (which was overdue anyway -- long story), but it didn't solve the problem. Adding to the mystery, launching Photoshop for the first time after reboot was as fast normal, but subsequent launches were painfully slow. It was only then that I considered that the problem with Photoshop started when I installed DisplayFusion. I uninstalled the program and the problems disappeared completely.

I found a free program (which I will, respectfully, not mention in this forum) and it's accomplishing my original goal (albeit without fading between wallpapers, which was a nice DisplayFusion touch).

I am not interested in troubleshooting and will simply not use DisplayFusion. I just wanted to record this for others to see. I work in IT and can't think of any correlation between DisplayFusion and Photoshop that would cause this strangely specific problem. It's quite an old version of Photoshop, so I can appreciate that this might not be applicable to many DisplayFusion users.

I'm a long time user of Display Fusion. Lately I've noticed that my windows will start lagging after a while...
I disabled DisplayFusion to check if it had anything to do, and to my surprise, my PC no longer lags after a while.

Like most of the users said above, this is very noticeable after a few hours.

I've been running my windows 11 installation with display fusion disabled for at least a week. Everything is still snappy and fast...

It pains me not to use display fusion, but unfortunately I can't just bear the performance hit that DisplayFusion brings...

Hi: I am also experiencing this issue - same parameters - no visible overuse of RAM/Disk. Triggers are disabled. Once the service is stopped, the lag disappears. Debug log attached.

TIA

Thank you, Owen. Unfortunately, as I stated in my post, I have chosen to uninstall DisplayFusion and only wanted to report the problem. However, the issue does seem to have been corroborated by at least one other user.

Was this in response to my issue (#19) or the next one (#21)?

I'd like to add to this one. I've been seeing this problem for many months now. I wonder if it started when the system tray icons subsystem was changed, I'm not sure. I know that not all my system tray icons shows up on my display fusion tasks bar (Nividia tray icon settings don't show up on DisplayFusion taskbar for exemple).

Just this morning I was running a memory benchmark with Aida64, and the RAM latency seemed higher then expected. Turned off DisplayFusion and behold, latency was back to normal (note that this may have been a fluke, as latency benchmark do tends to fluctuate between tries). Funny thing, is that when Aida64 got to the latency part of the benchmark, just when it was about to display the result number, the Aida64 memory benchmark window started blinking multiple times (for about a second or two) before displaying the results. Turning off displayFusion fixed this behaviour.

I usualy see this issue pop up after DisplayFusion has been running for a few days (leaving the computer running at all time). Turning display fusion off and restarting it clears it up. It's really anoying though because you never know when it will start making your computer behave strangely, slowing everything down.

This issues is really a bummer! Windows 11 is very limited in the options it gives for different taskbar behaviour on multi-monitor setup. I really need DisplayFusion to hide my task bar on my main monitor while keeping it displayed on my side monitor.

I hope this post can give a bit more informations in order to pin point the cause.

Sure here it is.

I did restart DisplayFusion yesterday so it hasn't bugged out yet. I can try to send you a report when it starts to missbehave, if that can help.

Reading the latest patch note it seems like you might have catched and fixed this bug afterall ?

Sure, will do. So far so good. We'll see in a week if it holds up

Calenders notifications from Outlook seems to be one of the cause of this from what I've seen. Especially when they linger for a long time before being dismissed.

Wanted to add to this discussion that I have not had luck running any of the 10.x versions of Display Fusion without significant performance issues, second monitor taskbar crashing, alt-tab slowdowns, etc. Apologies for not gathering debug info the last time I tried (last week), but I just needed the software to work and stop interfering with my actual work so I downgraded to 9.9 again, which has been working just fine for me.

Windows 11, nVidia graphics card, two monitors, main 1080P, secondary QHD in portrait mode with three taskbars on it.

Is there any known workaround for this as yet? I started having this issue as well a few weeks ago and for the longest time blamed Windows update, till I conicidentally found out that the lag completely disappeared when display fusion randomly crashed. After a bit of trial and error I found that it was indeed display fusion that was causing the lagging and I have disabled it from starting up for now.

I've attached the debug info. At the moment, Displayfusion is making my PC completely unusable - the process is always in the Top 5 most memory intensive processes in Task Manager.

I have had to disable it from auto-starting at boot. Before I disabled start with windows, Displayfusion would keep giving me a warning saying that a second instance was active. FWIW, the performance issues and this alert showing up happened simultaneously.

Unlike a few other Windows 11 users here, the change is instantaneous for me. Booting is painfully slow unless displayfusion is disabled. As soon as displayfusion starts, the PC becomes unusable, and as soon as I kill the process, the PC is back to being perfect.

I created two dumps. Here's a link. The link expires on 8th March.

I can't attach them here because the files are too big.

The error shows up only when Displayfusion starts with Windows, yes. If I start Displayfusion manually, the error does not show up.

Here's the dump: https://file.io/UnIZzsc3HYX4

All of these were incredibly hard to get. When Displayfusion is running, my entire system becomes unusable, and Task Manager seems to be getting hit extra-hard. I had to wait 3-8 seconds for a response for every click. As soon as I killed Displayfusion, everything was fine and dandy. I'm very curious what the issue is - Displayfusion has had minor bugs in the past, but never anything this extreme 😅

I've used DS for many years and have also had this issue with delays, constant latency, and crashes multiple times. I can't find what was suggested last time, but things were fine for the last couple years. My company forced an upgrade to Windows 11 last week, and I'm getting the delays, lags in responsiveness everywhere. Even just typing in web-based aspps. The CPU usage by DS was constantly between 10-20+ percent. It's so bad today that i had to disable DS altogether.

I'm currently running Pro 11.0 (Beta). Should I rollback to v10.1.2 • October 10, 2023?

I've come to rely on many of your features and hope this is correctable.



Debug Extraction file attached >

Environment: Windows 11, Corporate controls & security. Mostly Web-based apps running in Chrome, but many apps (local & web) running. 2 HDMI Monitors and the laptop monitor, all running independent with Window Titlebar butrtons and separate taskbars. No wallpaper or screensaver handling activated.

Thanks

Glad I found this thread! I am experiencing the same issue - sluggish response after PC has been running for a while. I originally thought it was due to resuming from sleep and some power setting, but once I closed DisplayFusion things got significantly better. In fact, turning off DisplayFusion at startup and running for a few hours without after reboot has improved tremendously.

What's interesting is I do not see DisplayFusion consuming any significant resources, but when opening task manager I see "system interupts". When running procmon or LatencyMon, I see high DPC and ISR execution times with tons of hard faults.

I've attached my logs if it helps.

I rolled back to 10.1.2 as you suggested. There's been some iumprovement, but DisplatFusion is still living at the top of my CPU Usage list in Task Manager between 9-12%. I tried to doo what you asked above in Task Manager, but those columns are not available in the Select Columns dialog. Still experiencing drag and latency with DisplayFusion running, but it goes away when I diasable it.

Hey! So I have been having the exact same problems as above, been using display fusion since December with zero issues, then suddenly yesterday I started getting this slowdown thing. When my computer started there was no issue, but the longer it ran, the less responsive my display fusion taskbars were. I have 3 monitors, the middle monitor still uses the windows default taskbar and it was fine, just the DF one's that went slow.

Restarting resets the issue and after an hour or so it's back to going slow.

I tried re-installing DF, no luck. Then I read this post where someone discovered resource monitor was the issue for them:
https://www.displayfusion.com/Discussions/View/windows-10-df-slow-system-response-over-time/?ID=a6f7ca51-8a5a-41f8-9fff-ca25a0c29870

I always have task manager open so I can keep an eye on system performance, and sure enough when I closed task manager, DF went back to normal instantly, and my CPU utilization dropped from about 12% to 7%. When I checked Ryzen Master, I could see that when it's going slow it was one or two cores that were being strained which makes sense as there's no need for multicore use on DF or most individual windows processes, but a core being nearly maxed out on a 7800X3D while the computer is idle makes no sense. And for task manager running in concert with DF being the cause makes even less sense.

At least restarting task manager is much quicker than restarting my PC but it'd be great if a root cause and fix could be found.

Hey and thanks for the quick reply. I turned off title bar buttons and re-opened task manager but the issue still occured after an hour or so

I, too, am experiencing very slow Win 10 performance, with both DisplayFusion and Windows Explorer showing very high power usage. I just stopped DisplayFusion, and the performance immediately improved. I've attached my exported log file. FWIW, I also suspect that Microsoft OneDrive is hogging resources. Granted my system is 4 years old and my OS is older, but this decrease in performance has happened in the last month.

I look forward to any hints. Thanks!

I am not able to determine exactly when the issue started vs when my IT department pushed out updates. Since my last ticket, update I've run the SFC and DISM. Some issues were corrected. Things are more stable right now, but DisplayFusion is always at the top of CPU and Power usage columns, modulating between Moderate and High power usage.

Thanks.

Just testing that solution now, will report back soon. I'm fairly sure the issue started for me after a windows update btw. Hadn't changed anything else on my system

It didn't work sadly, just to check, did you only want me to disble application hooks for task manager in the exception setting, or should I disable them entirely?

Does the above imply that you have not yet solved the open-handle-leak problem yet in the v11 beta? Or perhaps in the main 10.x branch, if you are still issuing patches for that. This issue seems to be one that you probably should patch in the customer branch when you have it nailed down.

I am about to try reinstalling DF (current beta build) after a long hiatus. If I get a chance I will gather some metrics and send them your way. But let me know if you need any troubleshooting info, and I will hook you up.

Oh, I am currently on the Win 10.0.19045 build, patched to some unknown months back if that matters.

Disabling all three in advanced settings does fix the issue, but of course it gets rid of a lot of the features I use so I'll keep going with task manager for now. Hope a fix can be found, if you need any more info let me know

I just sent in a support ticket for this as well, my system doesn't exactly become slow, but I am noticing per time consumed and PC Uptime - its consuming more and more RAM as working set numbers as time goes by. what happens for me is DF becomes unstable, i lost the multi-taskbars after some time. next time it happens ill get a taskman shot of the working mem, handles, threads user and gdi.

ill try the things discussed below as well

My troubleshooter is attached for more info for you guys

Hey! Sorry for the late reply, totally lost track of this thread. I've tested and application hooks seems to be the culprit. I first disabled shell hooks, issue still occured. I then disabled polling hooks and the issue did still occur but it felt like it took longer to break that time. Finally disabled application hooks and the issue never occured

Correct, disabling application hooks for just Task Manager didn't fix the issue, I'm guessing that means an application hook for some other application is affecting task manager somehow? Really weird. I haven't noticed the issue with any other program, it's only when I have task manager open and it's only the Display Fusion taskbars that crash upon trying to interact with them. I can alt tab over to task manager and it is a bit slow but nothing crashes and if I then close task manager the Display Fusion taskbars start working normally after a second.

So i just did my anual windows reinstall and that seems to have resolved the issue. I can now have task manager open as long as I like without any issues. Obviously not a great solution for anyone else having the issue

Hi again. My system fans go into takeoff mode quite a lot recently. I've grabbed 3 sets of Task Manager screenshots I took on occasions when I had very high power usage and noticed DisplayFusion and Explorer and oftentimes Chrome consuming tons of power. Please let me know what I can do to alleviate this issue or if there's a version I can roll back to.

Thanks!

Well it was nice while it lasted, the issue has just returned this morning on my 4 day old install of windows. Anything else you want me to test?

Typically, it's spiking and drops when I kill one or more of Explorer/Chrome/DisplayFusion. I'm currently not hearing my system fan go nuts, but I'm checking Task Manager to verify. <pauses to get screenshots>
Still high, it seems.

Yes, disabling Titlebar Buttons noticeably decreases the power usage from Very high to Low. Unfortunately, my titlebar buttons are extremely important to how I use various windows. I'm rather meticulous in how I choose to position windows. Hopefully you'll find a fix for what causes the power usage.

Thanks so much!

So disabling application hooks for both Task Manager and Explorer does fix the issue. Just as a test I removed Explorer so it was just the application hooks for Task Manager that were disabled like I tried before re-installing windows and this time the issue did not occur.

It's possible the re-install changed something or maybe I didn't disable application hooks correctly before. It was a while ago now so I don't remember clearly. I guess we just go off the assumption that it was human error on my end and disabling application hooks on just task manager does fix the issue. The alternative is that there's mutliple issues and reinstalling windows fixes some of them which feels less likely than me just making a mistake.

Ok scratch the above, it has just happened again with only Task Manager application hooks turned off. Will run a longer test with task manager and explorer turned off to see if that works still. It was fine for a day with both off, fine for maybe 2-3 hours with just task manager but has just suddenly started causing issues. I only noticed at first because CPU usage was higher than I expected and when I checked the application, it was Display Fusion using 9-10% of a 7800X3D

Hi! Any idea when the next beta is planned? The high power/CPU is definitely an irritation for me, so I'm really looking forward to the next release. Thanks so much!

I've got the same exact issue. I ended up building a completely new computer because I couldn't figure out what was causing the issue. The new computer had the same problem. It's something I've dealt with for over a year... having to restart every day otherwise it was lag-city, but the DisplayFusion process never really indicated high CPU or RAM usage so I never considered it the culprit. I finally got so fed up that I just started uninstalling programs one by one, as soon as I uninstalled DisplayFusion the problem stopped and has not returned.

I tried the latest beta version and it didn't help. I'm using Windows 11 with 2 monitors that use 2 different resolutions. AMD CPU and RTX4090 GPU, if that matters. I'd love to be able to use this software again but after having the same issue with 2 different computers there must be a major bug somewhere.

EDIT: To expand on the issues I was having, windows explorer and the taskbar would freeze and/or crash, the CPU would suddenly soar to 100% CPU for a few minutes and then eventually settle down somewhat, but the longer I had the system running the worse and more often the symptoms would get. After restarting it would work ok for a good 12 hours or better and then slowly the symptoms would return until the PC was unusable.

Do you have task manager open regularly? For me the issue only happened when I had it open and when I closed task manager it fixed the issue.

In the end, disabling application hooks for Task Manager and Explorer has compeletely fixed the issue. Go into Display Fusion settings, go to Compatibility and add an entry for taskmgr.exe and explorer.exe and disabled application hooks for both.

I haven't noticed any missing functionality but the issue is fixed after doing it. Hope it works for you too!

@Amped, thanks for the details about how to turn off application hooks. Not sure what OS you're using, but I've just implemented the Compatbility changes for Task Manager and Explorer on my Win10 system. I have high hopes this will fix things. Explorer is always an issue, and yeah, Taskmgr sends fans into takeoff mode, but I've come to just tolerate that one. Thanks again!

I had the same issue and solved it by disabling Multi-Monitor Taskbars in the DF Taskbar settings panel. Both Windows 10 and Windows 11 offer enough multi-monitor functionality for my needs. I use DF for many of its other features, but I don't see a significant advantage to the taskbar implementation. And it's defintely great to avoid sluggishness when using the Windows taskbars.

If you encounter slow performance, especially after an extended period of use, I highly recommend starting by disabling this option (DF Settings -> Taskbar -> uncheck "Enable Multi-Monitor Taskbars (show a taskbar on each Monitor)").