Identifying svchost

superscaper

I'm always getting 100% cpu use from an svchost.exe process at bootup and sometimes randomly after a while. It's PID 1100 in the screenshot, if anyone has any suggestions what's causing it and if it's legitimate.



thanks,
ss

jamalfatty

svchost.exe is a legitimate windows service - if you find an entry for scvhost.exe though you have a virus (notice the spelling).

Hogs the CPU on my PC occasionly but only normally for a short period of time. Dont try killing the process as your system will become very unstable without it.

You could try disabling some of those services it is using if not needed to free up some CPU cycles

mascherano

killing off the many useless services will resolve this problem, there are loads of guides out thrre including
http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_tips1036.html

superscaper

I know it's a legitimate process, I just wondered what the best way was of determining what was using it and linked with it and doing something about it. I don't think it's really malware as I've had the same thing before a complete reinstall. I just wanted to find which app/driver was the culprit.

Chippy_Minton

My guess is wuauserv - Automatic Updates. You can identify the culprit using Process Explorer. Double-click the relevant svchost.exe process and use the Services tab to identify which DLL each service uses (Automatic Updates is wuauserv.dll) and the Threads tab to see which DLL is using the most CPU.

xenny

superscaper wrote: »

I'm always getting 100% cpu use from an svchost.exe process at bootup and sometimes randomly after a while. It's PID 1100 in the screenshot, if anyone has any suggestions what's causing it and if it's legitimate.

It's almost certainly the problem discussed here, related to automatic updates:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/m/786004271831

The short answer is to install

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927891

and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932494

after which the svchost will still sometimes spike to 100%, but shouldn't slow the system up as much as it does now.

Processexplorer is a good tool for diagnosing this kind of thing BTW.

mostly

i had this problem, involved stopping auto updates within services, rebooting to safe mode & deleting a folder the name of which escapes me, but I'll root around.

Right click on my computer- expand Services and applications – click on services – Right click on automatic updates – Properties – select disabled as the startup type. Reboot to safe mode, navigate to C:\windows\ rename the folder SoftwareDistribution to SoftwareDistribution.old - (I just deleted it)
Go back to services and set the startup type to automatic.
Reboot – failed updates should now install and CPU usage drop to normal level.