4 ms·

Windows update via svchost.exe has been the problem on the machines I support. I randomly eats 100% of the CPU for minutes at a time. http://www.wintips.org/ho

by RachelF 10y ago

Windows update via svchost.exe has been the problem on the machines I support. I randomly eats 100% of the CPU for minutes at a time. http://www.wintips.org/how-to-fix-svchost-exe-netsvcs-memory-leak-or-high-cpu-usage-problems/ http://www.wintips.org/how-to-fix-svchost-exe-netsvcs-memory...

grawlinson 10y ago
If I don't use a specific PC for around a week, it's basically unusable on startup. CPU/HDD are at 100% for around 20 minutes, then every now and then they spike again. I dunno what the hell Microsoft are playing at, but I'm in the process of switching all my computers to Linux.
- amenod 10y ago
  Well, that's one thing you can be sure will never happen with Linux/*BSD. If some service bothers you, you can always reschedule it or turn it off. Good like with "phone home" updates in Windows 10! (unless you are an enterprise user, and even then...)
bsilvereagle 10y ago
The only solution to this I've found is to disable Windows Update from searching for updates by setting it to "Manual Updates Only". However, this causes a problem in that every time you want to actually update, Windows Update may rebuild the entire "installed updates" database from scratch which can take hours on a heavily patched machine.
- acqq 10y ago
  It's not related to the rebuilding or not rebuilding the "SoftwareDistribution" database (I've tried that) once the new updates exist, the traversal part is always slow, at least on Windows 7. (The database is, fascinatingly, the whole 1 GB big).
acqq 10y ago
It's a poorly programmed code of the Update subsystem, and I've located the problematic function spending all of the CPU time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11267019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11267019 wuaueng.dll!CUpdatesToPruneList::AddSupersedenceInfoIfNeeded The bug is obviously in highly inefficient traversal through the existing info about the updates, which didn't degrade to being so obviously bad at the time when there was just a small number of the updates. I've used Microsoft tools to diagnose that, and I'm not the only one who has found it, http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30535980-WIN7-MS-updates-taking-too-long~start=90 http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30535980-WIN7-MS-updates-ta... so the same info is available to Microsoft, but they obviously don't want to fix it. On my machine it takes some 4 hours using 100% CPU of one core. If there are only 100 millions of such machines, and if it's just 40 Watt hours used during these 4 hours, it gives some 4 Gigawatt hours wasted every month in the world due to that particular bad code (If I calculated it right, over one year, it's a rough equivalent of the total energy use of 1500 Germans or 500 US citizens.)

by RachelF 10y ago

grawlinson 10y ago

If I don't use a specific PC for around a week, it's basically unusable on startup. CPU/HDD are at 100% for around 20 minutes, then every now and then they spike again. I dunno what the hell Microsoft are playing at, but I'm in the process of switching all my computers to Linux.

amenod 10y ago
Well, that's one thing you can be sure will never happen with Linux/*BSD. If some service bothers you, you can always reschedule it or turn it off. Good like with "phone home" updates in Windows 10! (unless you are an enterprise user, and even then...)

bsilvereagle 10y ago

The only solution to this I've found is to disable Windows Update from searching for updates by setting it to "Manual Updates Only". However, this causes a problem in that every time you want to actually update, Windows Update may rebuild the entire "installed updates" database from scratch which can take hours on a heavily patched machine.

acqq 10y ago
It's not related to the rebuilding or not rebuilding the "SoftwareDistribution" database (I've tried that) once the new updates exist, the traversal part is always slow, at least on Windows 7. (The database is, fascinatingly, the whole 1 GB big).

acqq 10y ago

It's a poorly programmed code of the Update subsystem, and I've located the problematic function spending all of the CPU time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11267019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11267019 wuaueng.dll!CUpdatesToPruneList::AddSupersedenceInfoIfNeeded The bug is obviously in highly inefficient traversal through the existing info about the updates, which didn't degrade to being so obviously bad at the time when there was just a small number of the updates. I've used Microsoft tools to diagnose that, and I'm not the only one who has found it, http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30535980-WIN7-MS-updates-taking-too-long~start=90 http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30535980-WIN7-MS-updates-ta... so the same info is available to Microsoft, but they obviously don't want to fix it. On my machine it takes some 4 hours using 100% CPU of one core. If there are only 100 millions of such machines, and if it's just 40 Watt hours used during these 4 hours, it gives some 4 Gigawatt hours wasted every month in the world due to that particular bad code (If I calculated it right, over one year, it's a rough equivalent of the total energy use of 1500 Germans or 500 US citizens.)