What is the WindowsWorkload.Manager and how do you control or use it

Question

I am experiencing a weird, every 30s, load on the NPU of my arm-based Win 11 Notebook that seems to reduce battery.

I did some WPR traces and found the root cause to be

which is in C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\WindowsWorkload.Manager.1_1.7.804.0_arm64__8wekyb3d8bbwe

where the WorkloadsSessionManager.exe and WorkloadsSessionHost.exe are called with parameter -ServerName:Microsoft.Windows.Private.Workloads.SessionManager/Host

d----          30.03.2025    10:04                AppxMetadata
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04           2606 AppxBlockMap.xml
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04           3830 AppxManifest.xml
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04          10479 AppxSignature.p7x
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04         224792 CoPilotLibraryBroker.exe
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04          12856 Microsoft.Windows.Private.Workloads.SessionHost.winmd
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04          13848 Microsoft.Windows.Private.Workloads.SessionManager.winmd
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04          15416 Microsoft.Windows.PrivateCommon.winmd
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04          76832 SessionManagerBrokerProxyStub.dll
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04            232 windows.png
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04         174104 WorkloadsSessionHost.exe
-a---          30.03.2025    10:04         267320 WorkloadsSessionManager.exe

I cannot find any further info about this Workload Manager nor how I can get an overview of what exactly is running there. Any hint or direction would be helpful. Note: I know google and chatgpt :)

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 25 '25 at 20:44

Looks like any apps using the ONNX runtime might go through that SessionManager process for access to the NPU, which makes it hard to determine what other process may be asking it for info. There's some developer information about that here, though it doesn't specifically mention any manager

The actual caller is probably the new Semantic text search/indexing. There should be some options under Settings > Privacy & Security > Searching Windows. It's one of the loaded DLLs in your screenshot, so it seems the most likely

Otherwise, check if Microsoft Recall is enabled (specific to Snapdragon PCs): Settings > Privacy & Security > Recall & Snapshots

What is the WindowsWorkload.Manager and how do you control or use it

1 Answers1