4 ms·

Same here, only in my task manager its listed as a service host process which is pegging one core at 100%. I didn't understand what it was for months until I mu

by retox 10y ago

Same here, only in my task manager its listed as a service host process which is pegging one core at 100%. I didn't understand what it was for months until I must have let it finish because I wasn't doing anything CPU intensive and I got a Windows Update message. Funny thing is that after I clicked to see what updates were available, it had to do the whole process again! This is the last version of Windows I will run.

Silhouette 10y ago
We've had some similar problems with Windows Update on our Win7 systems in recent months as well. On a many-cored workstation it's an annoyance. On an older laptop with a dual core CPU, it's crippling. Like others posting here, we see the service host process spinning an entire core at around 100%. That keeps the CPU clock speeds and power draw up all the time as a notable side effect. This seems to be a separate issue from problems with Windows Update taking hours to check for and/or apply the updates themselves.
- wiredfool 10y ago
  Great, looks like I have both problems.
- barrkel 10y ago
  Glancing at the stack traces with symbol server downloads enabled, it looks like there's a n^2 or potentially even exponential algorithm being run during the checking phase - checks are run both passively and when actively applying. There's something very wrong with the design of the algorithm - it obviously doesn't scale. Bigger, fewer patches may simply be reducing the size of n. IMO a better approach would be to offload the work to MS: upload a list of applied updates and let the cloud do the crunching. Much higher chance of memoizing and reusing work that way too. It's a sign of MS's client oriented culture still sticking around.
Severian 10y ago
Yes, its under one of the many svchost processes that Win7 likes to throw up. And indeed, it wasn't until I loaded up Process Hacker to find out exactly what process was gobbling the CPU.

by retox 10y ago

Silhouette 10y ago

We've had some similar problems with Windows Update on our Win7 systems in recent months as well. On a many-cored workstation it's an annoyance. On an older laptop with a dual core CPU, it's crippling. Like others posting here, we see the service host process spinning an entire core at around 100%. That keeps the CPU clock speeds and power draw up all the time as a notable side effect. This seems to be a separate issue from problems with Windows Update taking hours to check for and/or apply the updates themselves.

wiredfool 10y ago
Great, looks like I have both problems.
barrkel 10y ago
Glancing at the stack traces with symbol server downloads enabled, it looks like there's a n^2 or potentially even exponential algorithm being run during the checking phase - checks are run both passively and when actively applying. There's something very wrong with the design of the algorithm - it obviously doesn't scale. Bigger, fewer patches may simply be reducing the size of n. IMO a better approach would be to offload the work to MS: upload a list of applied updates and let the cloud do the crunching. Much higher chance of memoizing and reusing work that way too. It's a sign of MS's client oriented culture still sticking around.

Severian 10y ago

Yes, its under one of the many svchost processes that Win7 likes to throw up. And indeed, it wasn't until I loaded up Process Hacker to find out exactly what process was gobbling the CPU.