A nasty error in World of Warcraft is currently overloading your PC? With a little trick, you can prevent the error until the developers fix it.
In World of Warcraft, there is currently a pretty nasty bug that diminishes the gaming experience. After a while, there can be severe stuttering, and the entire system is increasingly slowed down. Pleasant gaming becomes almost impossible, and the cause is hard to find. The culprit is a bug that leads to a “Memory Leak.” The bug was introduced with Patch 10.2 Guardian of the Dreams.
What kind of error is this? In the case of a memory leak, your RAM gets overloaded because World of Warcraft keeps demanding more space. While the game normally should only occupy a few gigabytes of RAM, the memory leak causes this value to continually rise, and there seems to be no end in sight. WoW “consumes” as much memory as it can – and the longer the game runs, the worse it gets. An end is only in sight when your memory is completely exhausted.
The result: the entire PC is slow, World of Warcraft stutters heavily.
This error affects all users of DirectX 11 and Mac computers.
How to fix the error? There is currently no permanent solution, but there is a workaround you can apply. If you notice that World of Warcraft is consuming too much memory, which you can see in the Task Manager (CTRL+ALT+DELETE), then a small console command helps, which you simply need to enter in the chat window of the game:
/console gxrestart
This reduces the RAM usage back to the default value – at least temporarily. After a while, the amount starts to increase again. So save this command and use it regularly to avoid overloading your computer.
When will the error be fixed? Blizzard has already identified the error. Apparently, it is due to a faulty line of code that only occurs on the live servers and therefore was overlooked during internal testing. A fix for the problem is expected to be available within this week – so you probably won’t have to deal with this workaround for long.
A bug fix is expected to go live during the current week, likely with scheduled maintenance on Wednesday.
Are you affected by the problem?
