[SOLVED] ESO.exe memory leak caused by Overwolf TS overlay

Icy

I was getting a particularly nasty memory leak in ESO.exe which was causing to to rapidly climb to 3GB of usage and then crash to desktop within 15 minutes. It took me quite a while to troubleshoot, but I finally figured out what was causing the problem and I thought I'd document it here in case someone else is getting the same problem.

The conditions were:

1. In Cyrodiil or Imperial City (though probably any location with the below conditions filled might have triggered the error).
2. In Teamspeak (current 64-bit version)
3. Using Overwolf for the Teamspeak overlay and Twitch overlay (current version as of early January. Problem was likely introduced in Overwolf around that time).
4. In a group with 16+ people (or lots of people talking in TS at the same time would probably replicate the error, even if the actual group was small)
5. Recording using Shadowplay (current version)

With these conditions I could see the memory use of ESO.exe climb to about 3GB and then crash to desktop. In a 2 hour play session it might crash 7 or 8 times. Understandably I was frustrated. For reference, I never exceeded using half of my physical memory (16GB total).

Testing showed that using 1-4 (though not recording) also had a slow memory leak, though it pushed it out to an hour or two.

After some time of frustration, and initially suspecting TS of being the culprit, I found Overwolf error that indicated that it was actually the problem. With the "notifications" turned on in the Overwolf TS overlay, it shows a small image in the top corner of the person speaking at the moment. In a situation like Cyrodiil thousands of those messages can flash up rapidly, and this is what was causing the problem. When those notifications were turned off, even with everything else the same, my problem went away and there was no memory leak at all.

I hope this can help someone else.

(This was logged as 160104-001741)