[Bug] Memory leak: claude.exe grows to 21GB+ on Windows during normal workflow with sub-agents

Environment

• OS: Windows 11 Home 10.0.26200
• Claude Code version: latest (March 2026)
• Shell: Git Bash (MSYS2)
• MCP servers enabled: pptx, xlsx, docx (COM automation)

Description

claude.exe consumes 21.7 GB RAM during a normal working session. The session involved switching to a project with moderate knowledge base files (~400KB text) and running 2 sub-agent (Agent tool) invocations (~250K tokens total).

Task Manager confirms only claude.exe (PID single process) is consuming the memory -- not Office apps or other MCP server processes.

"claude.exe","25940","Console","1","21,758,864 K"

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open Claude Code with a project that has ~400KB of context files (CLAUDE.md + project state + knowledge base)
2. Run 2-3 sub-agent invocations (Agent tool, ~100-150K tokens each)
3. Observe RAM growth in Task Manager

Observed Behavior

• claude.exe RAM grows from normal (~300MB) to 21,758,864 KB (21.7 GB) within a single session
• RAM does not decrease after sub-agents complete
• System remains functional but heavily memory-constrained

Expected Behavior

RAM should stabilize or be garbage-collected after sub-agent results are returned.

Additional Context

This appears related to existing reports: #4953, #21378, #22188, #26528, #27421.

The issue may be exacerbated by:

• Sub-agent transcripts retained in Node.js heap
• V8 heap fragmentation from large JSON tool results
• MCP server connections (3 COM automation servers)

Reducing context window input (~30K tokens/session via lazy loading) did NOT resolve the issue, confirming the leak is at the Node.js/V8 layer, not the LLM context layer.