What Is Runtime Broker On Your PC, And Is It Safe To Disable It?

When you open the Task Manager on your Windows computer, you'll find a long list of processes running in the background. All these processes are related to different features of Windows. For instance, you'll find a WidgetService.exe process that is responsible for the Widgets you use on Windows. Similarly, there's a Runtime Broker process that's related to the universal apps you have installed on your computer.

Most of the time, this process will sit silently in the Task Manager, but other times, you will find it consuming a significant amount of CPU resources. This will mainly happen the moment you launch an app downloaded from the Microsoft Store. If you have a high-end computer, you might not notice any performance difference because of this process, but on a low-end device, such a sudden increase in CPU consumption can lead to a laggy overall system performance for a few seconds. Looking at the performance drop, you might think of disabling the Runtime Broker permanently. Although there's a way to do that, you should never consider doing it, and there's a good reason behind it.

Microsoft introduced the Windows Store along with Windows 8 in 2012. While the platform was later rebranded to Microsoft Store, it continued to serve the same purpose — act as a digital distribution platform from where you can download apps, games, movies, and more on your Windows computer. To ensure that all the apps that you have downloaded from the Microsoft Store adhere to their declared permissions, Microsoft added Runtime Broker as a core process on Windows.

For instance, if you open a media-related app that you have downloaded from the Microsoft Store, then the process will check and ensure that the app is declaring all permissions for all the areas that the app has access to, such as your storage. In a nutshell, you can consider it a broker that connects the apps you have downloaded from the Microsoft Store, or Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps to the trust and privacy settings.

When you boot your computer, Runtime Broker starts running in the background, consuming almost no CPU resources. The moment you open a UWP app, you'll see around a 30% rise in CPU usage by Runtime Broker. It's because it's checking all the permissions that the UWP app has on your device. Once it's done checking the permission, its CPU consumption will settle back down to normal numbers. This is what happens in normal scenarios.

Sometimes you might find that after launching a UWP app, the Runtime Broker process will continue to consume a lot of CPU resources even after you close that app. Generally, such situations occur as a temporary glitch, and you can solve it by simply closing the Runtime Broker process using the Task Manager. To do that, open the Task Manager, right-click Runtime Broker, and choose End Task. This should solve the issue.

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But if you notice that the problem occurs every time you launch a particular UWP app, then it indicates that there's an issue with the app itself. In such a case, there are a couple of things you can do. If the app isn't essential, you can uninstall it, and that should resolve the problem instantly. However, if the app is important to you, then you should consider updating that app.

1. Open the Microsoft Store and click the Downloads icon in the bottom-left corner.
2. Under the Updates & downloads section, you'll find a list of all the apps for which updates are available. Download the update available for the UWP that's causing the issue.

While the above workarounds will be helpful on both Windows 10 and 11, there's a specific solution that you should consider using if you are facing the problem on Windows 10. On your Windows 10 PC, open Settings and navigate to System > Notifications & Action. Then, turn off the Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows. This could prevent Runtime Broker from taking up system bandwidth. 

Yes, it's possible to disable Runtime Broker by editing the registry, but you should never consider doing it. Runtime Broker is an official Windows component, which means disabling it might make your computer unstable. Additionally, it looks after your security and privacy when you are interacting with a UWP app. So, disabling this process is going to do more harm than good.

Since Runtime Broker is an important Windows process, it might be one of the main targets for malicious agents. They can attack the real process and replace it with a malicious file. This can steal your information and even harm your computer. To ensure that the legitimate Runtime Broker process is running on your computer, right-click the process in the Task Manager and choose Open file location. It should open the C:Windows/System32 directory. 

If any other location opens up on your computer, then there's a high possibility that it's a virus that has replaced the real Runtime Broker. To confirm, visit the Virustotal website and upload the suspicious Runtime Broker file. If the results show that the file is malicious, use an antivirus program to remove the virus from your Windows PC.