Sudden terrible performance of AE on Surface Pro

Hello everyone,

I have been using Surface Pro 7+ for AE and PR for over a year and never had major problems until about a month ago. Suddenly, I'm getting terribkle performance and AE is using enormous amounts of RAM, even when only working on one simple comp (many comps in the project but only one open):

How is it possible that AE may be using almost 9GB of RAM from one simple comp??