How to solve lsass.exe very high ram usage?

My machine has been feeling sluggish and I'm noticing that the lsass.exe process is allocating nearly 2GB, which seems unusually high.

here:

(Win7x64,Vertex2,Gtx460,i7-2600,8gb ram)

Any ideas?

1 Answer

On my system, lsass.exe is consuming about 10K.

I'm at work. On our company's main domain controller, lsass.exe is up to about 80K.

Either your lsass.exe is infected, a piece of malware is trying to do something funny, or (least likely) something over the network is trying to do the same.

It's also possible you may have a legitimate program making a legitimate amount of authentication requests - possibly something running as another user accessing many, many files in a short period of time or similar.