svchost.exe hogging over 220,000K

[TheoPetro]

My laptop has been running slow as hell lately so I opened up the task manager to see if anything was eating up a lot of memory or processor capacity. I have multiple svchost.exe processes but two of them are taking up a ton of memory. One is taking up ~130,000K and the other is taking up ~90,000K.

I am running vista business (32bit) on an HP pavilion dv2700 with 3gb of ram.

Any ideas on why those 2 processes are using up that much memory?

 

[jgigz]

To the best of my knowledge (someone elaborate or correct me if I'm wrong), svchost interfaces with the registry (.dll files, obviously). Not sure what you do with the computer but if the registry has become cluttered with ghost dlls or unused extension, it could cause it to use a lot of memory holding them but not actualy using them. Download and run CCleaner and run the registry tool a few times (doesn't get it all in one go) and see if that would help.

Edit:

This should help you narrow it down as well, taken from Microsoft knowledge base.

To view the list of services that are running in Svchost:

1. Click Start on the Windows taskbar, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type CMD, and then press ENTER.
3. Type Tasklist /SVC, and then press ENTER.

Tasklist displays a list of active processes. The /SVC switch shows the list of active services in each process. For more information about a process, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
Tasklist /FI "PID eq processID" (with the quotation marks)

 

[Scotteq]

svchost is a generic process. Your issue is going to be with whatever application/driver is using it. To identify what that may be, please download and install Process Monitor. It's basically a version of the standard system monityr, only on some nice streroids. Using it, you'll be able to drill down to see what is using svchost.

http://technet.microsoft.com/e...nternals/bb896653.aspx

Once you've identified the root, then all you need to do is fix that.

 

[Nothinman]

To the best of my knowledge (someone elaborate or correct me if I'm wrong), svchost interfaces with the registry (.dll files, obviously). Not sure what you do with the computer but if the registry has become cluttered with ghost dlls or unused extension, it could cause it to use a lot of memory holding them but not actualy using them.

Most things interface with the registry but "ghost" entries should have no affect on their memory usage. The registry is just a type of database, extra entries take up a bit of disk space and might cause tools that scan the whole registry to take a bit more time but that's it.

As Scotteq says, svchost is a generic daemon. Other programs use it to run services on their behalf so that they don't have to write a full blown service. And a single svchost instance can include dozens of those services so it's use cuts down on resources. To see what each svchost process is doing you need to use 'tasklist /svc' or a 3rd party tool like Process Monitor.

 

[jgigz]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

To the best of my knowledge (someone elaborate or correct me if I'm wrong), svchost interfaces with the registry (.dll files, obviously). Not sure what you do with the computer but if the registry has become cluttered with ghost dlls or unused extension, it could cause it to use a lot of memory holding them but not actualy using them.

Most things interface with the registry but "ghost" entries should have no affect on their memory usage. The registry is just a type of database, extra entries take up a bit of disk space and might cause tools that scan the whole registry to take a bit more time but that's it.

Thanks for the clarification. :thumbsup:

 

[Rhonda the Sly]

We did this two weeks ago:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=34&threadid=2318709

 

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: Scotteq
svchost is a generic process. Your issue is going to be with whatever application/driver is using it. To identify what that may be, please download and install Process Monitor. It's basically a version of the standard system monityr, only on some nice streroids. Using it, you'll be able to drill down to see what is using svchost.

http://technet.microsoft.com/e...nternals/bb896653.aspx

Once you've identified the root, then all you need to do is fix that.

yep, best way to fix it is to figure out which service it is. One other way to do so without pain is to right on the entry in task manager, and select "Go To Service(s)"

big mem usage sounds like windows update, but just guessing at this point.

OP, please let us know which is the guilty service.
Useful article:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto...and-why-is-it-running/