DWM Crashes on Windows Server 2022 with A10 and Large Memory

I am working with a pair of new servers with Server 2022, each with 2TB RAM and a single A10 GPU with the 538.33 driver. We are running Remote Desktop Services for a multi-user environment for engineering applications.

We see a behavior where the 16th user logs in to the server, the login succeeds but the session create fails. In the Application event log we see events from Application Error reporting that DWM.exe crashed with exception code 0xe0464645. There is a event from dwminit indicating the DWM process has exited with the same code.

Findings from troubleshooting:

  • Removing the GPU eliminates the issue, but is not workable for the use case
  • Installing Server 2019 eliminates the issue, and we may go down this path, but would prefer Server 2022
  • Reducing memory to 500GB eliminates the issue, but limits server usage given some of the designs and number of users.

We’re doing a little more testing, but at this point it looks like a combination of the A10 GPU driver with Windows Server 2022 and a lot of RAM.

I’m looking for help understanding if this is a known issue and, if so, if there’s a known timeline to address, as this feels like an Nvidia issue.

Thanks!

Sounds like a resource handling issue. Needs to be investigated from enterprise support. As you should have vApps licenses for this you are eligable to open a support ticket.
Regards Simon

Hi @jfbradfo

We have been something similar. Also running RDSH. We get disconnects and problem with reconnecting showing black screens. Slow logons that can stall for minutes. Got the DWM crashes in the eventlog.

However we’re running on servers with 128GB RAM. For now we’ve disabled the A10s.

Did you find a solution?

-J

I can only repeat myself. Please open a support ticket to investigate the issue properly. There could be multiple reasons for this. Often it is a FB exhaust and then you need to reduce the amount of CCUs on the given machine.