SteelSeries Sonar, which I use for my microphone, has recently begun consuming huge amounts of memory over time—usually more than 25GB, and once close to 50GB. When this happens, my system becomes sluggish, audio starts lagging, and Windows audio may crash without recovering. I first noticed the issue while playing a game, and it has happened several times since.
I also noticed that the Node.js runtime, which may be associated with my Stream Deck software, sometimes uses more than 1GB of memory. Restarting Sonar temporarily fixes the problem, and force-closing the Node.js process makes it restart at roughly 50MB.
As a temporary workaround, I created a scheduled PowerShell background process that monitors Sonar's memory usage and restarts it when it exceeds 2GB. This causes a brief audio interruption but prevents the wider audio failure and system slowdown.
Has anyone else experienced a memory leak like this with Sonar or its related software? Are there known settings, updates, or troubleshooting steps that could identify the cause? I plan to contact SteelSeries support, but I would appreciate suggestions in the meantime. My system has 64GB of RAM, an Intel i9-14900KS, and an RTX 5090.
2 Answers
I have not seen this behavior on a similarly high-end system, but it may still be worth monitoring Sonar and the related applications over time. A steadily increasing memory footprint strongly suggests a software bug rather than a lack of physical RAM.
Keep an eye on the Node.js process separately. Applications such as Stream Deck can use Node.js, and restarting that process reducing its usage from over 1GB to around 50MB suggests it may also be leaking memory or hosting a problematic plugin. Updating, disabling recently added extensions, or temporarily closing Stream Deck could help isolate whether it is contributing to the audio problems.
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