svchost?

[Nick]

How many of these damn things should be running?

Monday saw my PC suddenly go dog slow... a quick look showed FOUR svchost.exe running, one of which was using 99% of the CPU.

I tried everything I could think of to shut it down and stop it re-starting. According to Microsoft its some kind of database program. Stopping it within XP wasn't a problem but on each re-boot it just started up again. For example, the My Computer window was taking 4-5 MINUTES to open and show my drives etc.

The only way I found to stop it was to roll back to last Friday, then it was fine and has been fine since.

Before I did this I ran three different Spyware killers and virus scanned all my drives with no results.

So what on earth was going on?

[TiG]

Heh Deckard, all SVCHOST does is run a Dynamic Link Libary, DLL file, so at the time you've got 4 DLL's running. Its difficult to say what each one is running so i'm not going to be much help there.

But seeing 4 SVCHOST is pretty standard, i've got 5 running on my win2k work machine sure none of them is taking any CPU power, but one of them has written 340MB in files since this was last rebooted some 18 days ago.

This might be something to do with any number of processes I run on this machine. I'm pretty sure that word/office type applications would run 1 version of SVCHOST for the run32.dll file so did you have office running at the time, or the office tool bar?.

That might account for one, another might be graphics or sound drivers.

Difficult to say but if you installed any new programs, changed any hardware? between when you had this problem and Friday.

TiG

[Spunkey]

my missus laptop had the exact same problem you're having Deckard!
although, with hers one of the svchost processes jumped to 99% when she logged in to tinternet.

IIRC multiple svchosts is perfectly fine, but there is a virus which runs a process called 'scvhost' which does a similar thing.

I never got to the root of the problem (it wasnt a virus). All i did was run ad-aware and a norton scan. They both came up with nothing, but the problem hasnt come back in 3-4 months

HTH!

[nichomach]

Deck, may I recommend MS Knowlegebase article ? Explains what svchost is, why you can have multiple instances and why that isn't a problem. If one of them's suddenly using 99% CPU time and not releasing it, I'd suspect a software install gone wonky, though. As per TiG's suggestion, installed any new programmes or updated any drivers?

[Kezzer]

the svchost's control certain things iirc. For example, disabling the printer service in services.msc will get rid of one of those svchost's.

[directhex]

svchost, as the name suggests, hosts a "service", a particular type of windows nt background program. you can see which services are loaded by right-clicking on my computer, clicking manage, and services is on the list on the left.

i checked how many svchosts are running on my remaning windows (2003 server) machine, and it's seven :x

[iMc]

Ive got 6 running at the moment. One is using 22mb of memory.

Always wondered what they are!

[Steve]

One of them is found the windows sound system - well it is on my computer anyway.

I've found that that one has a habbit of eating memory. The reason I found out what it did was because I said "oy, you memory hog *end process*" and found I had no sound, lol.

[Apex]

6 running on m xp machine.

[arsen]

cant remember which, but either megaping or aatools will tell you exactly what each svchost does, aswell as loadsa useful tools