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How do I troubleshoot high 'svchost.exe' usage in Windows 7?

How do I troubleshoot high 'svchost.exe' usage in Windows 7?

I'm having a problem with Windows 7 64-bit. I thought it was slow and all, but then I saw that the CPU usage was always around 80% and started searching for a solution.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 291
Total answers/comments: 4
bert [Entry]

"I’m surprised about the advice that others have given on this issue (some even simply made guesses).

For Leonardo and others who find their way here, there are some teps that everybody else missed.

Yes, start by getting a copy of Process Explorer.
Yes, next look at the instances of SVCHOST.EXE that are running and double-click the one with the high CPU usage.
Yes, look at the Services tab to find out what services are being hosted by that instance of svchost.

This is where everybody else stopped; that’s not enough. Now, you need to run Services.msc and stop each of the services that are hosted by the runaway instance of svchost in turn, making sure to wait and watch for a while after each to see if the CPU load drops. If it does, then the last one that you stopped was the culprit.

At this point, you know exactly what service was hogging the CPU and can then pursue finding out why that specific service would suck cycles."
bert [Entry]

"I also have had an issue with svchost.exe causing 100% CPU usage. The services in question related to svchost are NLASvc, LanmanWorkstation, Dnscache, and CryptSvc. My problem ended up being Firefox. In the latest version they added plugin-container.exe which runs as a process separately from Firefox. The idea behind it is if a plugin crashes it won't crash Firefox or your browsing session. But it made surfing on my system unbearable.
The solution: Disable plugin container process.

Open Firefox web browser.
Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter key.
A warning will appear. Ignore it and press the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
In the Filter field type dom.ipc. Six preferences will appear for the filter dom.ipc.
Ignore first and last preferences (dom.ipc.plugins.enabled and dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs). Toggle (double-click) each of the four remaining preferences to change the value from “true” to “false“.

You are done, restart Firefox and open up Windows task manager to see that the plugin container process is disabled..
More information
The crash protection feature in Firefox 3.6 is enabled for certain plugins only. The four preferences that we modified here specifies four different out-of-process plugins. They are the NPAPI test plugin, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime (Windows) and Microsoft Silverlight (Windows). These plugins are specified in a separate dom.ipc.plugins.enabled preference by default is set to true. We can disable them by changing their value to false. And thus plugin-container.exe will not run. By default, the preference dom.ipc.plugins.enabled is already set to “false”. So, no need to touch it. The dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs is also not important here as other values are false.
I hope this helps somebody."
"I also have had an issue with svchost.exe causing 100% CPU usage. The services in question related to svchost are NLASvc, LanmanWorkstation, Dnscache, and CryptSvc. My problem ended up being Firefox. In the latest version they added plugin-container.exe which runs as a process separately from Firefox. The idea behind it is if a plugin crashes it won't crash Firefox or your browsing session. But it made surfing on my system unbearable.
The solution: Disable plugin container process.

Open Firefox web browser.
Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter key.
A warning will appear. Ignore it and press the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
In the Filter field type dom.ipc. Six preferences will appear for the filter dom.ipc.
Ignore first and last preferences (dom.ipc.plugins.enabled and dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs). Toggle (double-click) each of the four remaining preferences to change the value from “true” to “false“.

You are done, restart Firefox and open up Windows task manager to see that the plugin container process is disabled..
More information
The crash protection feature in Firefox 3.6 is enabled for certain plugins only. The four preferences that we modified here specifies four different out-of-process plugins. They are the NPAPI test plugin, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime (Windows) and Microsoft Silverlight (Windows). These plugins are specified in a separate dom.ipc.plugins.enabled preference by default is set to true. We can disable them by changing their value to false. And thus plugin-container.exe will not run. By default, the preference dom.ipc.plugins.enabled is already set to “false”. So, no need to touch it. The dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs is also not important here as other values are false.
I hope this helps somebody."
bert [Entry]

I had the same thing , killed Windows Defender and now i'm fine. Best of luck to you.
bert [Entry]

"From your screenshots, it seems like the audio service is involved.

There might be a connection with the problem described in
win 7 high cpu usage on 2 services
(see last answer).

Try to disable the integrated audio and see if this helps."