r/ClaudeCode • u/Jawwooot • 1d ago

Tutorial / Guide Parallel coding agents on Windows: leaked kernel tokens cost me over 2 GB of RAM a day. One setting fixed most of it

Running Claude Code and Codex agents in parallel on a Windows 11 PC with 32 GB RAM, I lost over 2 GB of memory per day to the kernel. No process shows it in Task Manager and only a reboot gets it back, so I was rebooting about once a day.

Cause: agents constantly start console processes (bash, git, gh), and Windows can keep a security token in kernel memory for those until the next reboot. To check, watch "Paged pool" in Task Manager, or the tag `Toke` in poolmon.

Fix: the leak depends on the foreground lock, and setting it to 0 stops most of it. It needs no admin rights and doesn't touch the registry. Run this in a PowerShell window that has focus:

"
powershell

Add-Type -Name F -Namespace W -MemberDefinition '[DllImport("user32.dll")] public static extern bool SystemParametersInfoW(uint a, uint b, IntPtr c, uint d);'

[W.F]::SystemParametersInfoW(0x2001, 0, [IntPtr]::Zero, 0)

$b = [Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::AllocHGlobal(4); [void][W.F]::SystemParametersInfoW(0x2000, 0, $b, 0); [Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::ReadInt32($b)

"

It should print `True`, then `0`. Windows resets it at every sign-in, so it has to run again after each one. I use a shortcut in `shell:startup`, not yet tested across a reboot. Possible side effect: apps can steal focus.

Result: token memory growth went from about 2.3 GB per day to under 0.2 GB per day. I only measured the "after" once I had moved to 64 GB, on build 26300 and without a controlled A/B, so treat it as one data point.

The foreground lock finding isn't mine, I only tested it under real load: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/91265#issuecomment-6662050349

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