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Excessive memory usage by the Agent Desktop Console

Due to a potentially faulty OpenGL implementation in the GPU/IGP driver, a memory leak issue may occur when the agent keeps switching between console tabs. Each switch between tabs can increase memory usage of the Agent Desktop Console by 100-200 Mbytes, and can even reach several GBytes causing a serious system performance degradation. This article provides a number of possible solutions to remedy the memory leak issue.

How can I fix the issue?

Driver update
We recommend that you try updating your GPU/IGP driver first.
Manually setting the renderer for UI framework
Attention: This solution requires advanced Windows system administrator knowledge. If you do not feel comfortable with following the below instructions, contact your system administrator.

The UI framework driving the Agent Desktop Console always uses one of three types of renderers.

  • OpenGL
  • DirectX via ANGLE (OpenGL ES API)
  • Software OpenGL
In most cases, the most suitable renderer for the given configuration is selected automatically. However, when there is an issue with the GPU/IGP driver, the selected renderer may cause problems leading to a memory leak. To fix the issue, you can manually select one of the above renderers by setting the QT_OPENGL environment variable to the corresponding value.
  • "desktop" for OpenGL (preferred choice)
  • "angle" for DirectX via ANGLE (preferred choice)
  • "software" for Software OpenGL (only try this if the above two do not work!)
Agent Web Console
If updating the driver does not help and you do not have the technical knowledge to change the required environment variable, you can use the Agent Web Console until you get help from your system administrator.
Article last updated: 27 September, 2022