6 ms·

I know you said that as a joke, but my work machine with 32GB of RAM is constantly being eaten alive by svchost.exe and the only thing I can do is reboot once a

I know you said that as a joke, but my work machine with 32GB of RAM is constantly being eaten alive by svchost.exe and the only thing I can do is reboot once a day to keep it from ballooning out of control. I really don’t get why the industry is still on Windows for the most part. I wish my company would just standardize on some supported variant of a Linux Desktop and be done with Windows once and for all.

kogir 3y ago
svchost.exe is literally what the name implies. It's a generic service host. You pass it a dll and an entrypoint (via command line arguments and registry keys) and it runs it. You should look at which thing it's actually running to see what's using all your CPU. Some articles detailing what it does and how it works: [1] https://nasbench.medium.com/demystifying-the-svchost-exe-process-and-its-command-line-options-508e9114e747 https://nasbench.medium.com/demystifying-the-svchost-exe-pro... [2] https://pusha.be/index.php/2020/05/07/exploration-of-svchost-exe-p-flag/ https://pusha.be/index.php/2020/05/07/exploration-of-svchost... [3] https://blog.didierstevens.com/2019/10/29/quickpost-running-a-service-dll/ https://blog.didierstevens.com/2019/10/29/quickpost-running-...
- atlas_hugged 3y ago
  I went to help desk cuz I was being lazy, but Help desk was unfortunately kind of useless. They just wanted to reimage my machine and I haven’t had the time to go that route yet. I’m always busy. I did a bit of investigating with ProcMon recently but I really need to spend more time on it. As always, it comes down to time with these things. These articles were great by the way! I’ve never gotten significantly down and dirty in svchost, so these were a treat to read. I much appreciate the effort in your response. Have a pleasant day!
RamRodification 3y ago
> my work machine with 32GB of RAM is constantly being eaten alive by svchost.exe and the only thing I can do is reboot once a day Maybe you're self-employed and unsuccessful in troubleshooting this yourself, but that sounds like a five-minutes-with-a-first-line-support-technician problem. If you don't have a tech support department to turn to (or if they are incompetent), investigate the process with ProcessExplorer from Sysinternals to find out what that service host process is running and go from there. The industry is still on Windows because it's easier to manage in a corporate setting. And usually better for software compatibility.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  This presupposes that identifying the problem is the 1st step to fixing it. In many professional settings, convincing someone that the problem needs to be fixed is the actual problem to solve. I had a near equivalent problem where my Windows desktop was brought to its knees by an instance of Glassfish running on it by some sort of policy. We did embedded development, low level stuff like data plane processing via FPGA. Internal IT spent 1/2 an hour trying to convince me that Glassfish was an essential part of my development stack. I never bothered to convince them to solve the morning 9 AM virus scan of every file on disk. I just hung out in the break room for the 45 minutes it took while the UI was almost totally useless
  - vundercind 3y ago
    At some point you just have to accept that if an employer really, really, really insists on paying you to do nothing while they prevent you from using a vital tool they issued you... well, that must be what they want. They're paying the bills and are in control of that entire chain of decision-making, after all. Let 'em pay for it if that's what they want.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      That’s an infantile attitude, you are suppose to take responsibility for your work environment. Speak to the manager of your manager, and if that doesn’t work, to the manager of the manager of the manager. If that does not work, write a handwritten letter to the CEO and deliver it. If the CRO knew about this, they would definitely fix it! Don’t forget a a wax seal, they love those!
      - vundercind 3y ago
        Oh, you should try. I just don't think heroic efforts are in order. If you say "hey, this thing is wasting a bunch of my time, are you sure you want to do that?" and they say "yes"... well, alright.
- atlas_hugged 3y ago
kikokikokiko 3y ago
In my case (non US, government owned IT company), they make every developer use Windows because someone is getting paid to make the purchase, that's it. Once the machines arrive, every single dev erases the OS and put his preferred version of Linux on it. And that's why my country is the s*t hole it is.
stephenr 3y ago
> I wish my company would just standardize on some supported variant of a Linux Desktop I mean, it doesn't sound like your current windows desktop is particularly supported.
- atlas_hugged 3y ago
  Haha this is true. Help desk is of the “not going to waste time and just re-image” mentality, so I decided not to nuke the next couple days of productivity setting it all back up. With Linux these gremlins tend to be a bit less of a problem in my, gosh 20 years of IT experience. 20 years, wow! Am I really that old? Dear god. Where does the time go?
  - stephenr 3y ago
    Many moons ago my first job in the industry was working in an IT department for a technical college; this was the days of windows 98/xp and Novell netware; Even then unless it was a trivial issue, it was often a simpler fix to just re-image (or swap out hardware if we happened to have new ones available) - because most people had zero custom software installed (except for the 8 different IE toolbars they had somehow installed but swear appeared automatically) and after all, its windows: restoring from a clean image meant the machine would suddenly have that new car smell again and it'd likely last longer until the next issue would pop up. For people with custom software there was usually more leeway to troubleshoot problems - particularly if it was stuff that needed one-off configuration. I do feel your pain but having been on the other side of that fence I also feel their pain.
Workaccount2 3y ago
If linux (devs) could just swallow their pride and embrace some heavily windows influenced design choices I am confident linux could see widespread adoption. This would finally create the incentive for product developers to actually create and support linux based products. People really want to get away from windows. But they really really don't want to deal with an OS that feels like it's 1990.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  > But they really really don't want to deal with an OS that feels like it's 1990. I'd rather a 1990 feel than the current feel where everything is flat and it's not obvious what's interactable and my 27" 4K monitor is 90% whitespace.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    In a linux terminal, -nothing- is obvious.
    - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
      Hah, that's a good point! Though it is possible to use Linux and never need the terminal, especially if you're not an engineer.
- atlas_hugged 3y ago
  You heard of wununtu? Or as the kids say “uWubuntu” Haha. Wait, what’s wrong with 90’s style? Check out how fast the 90’s style Serenity OS project is. It’s really something special they’re building.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
svchost.exe isn't a service itself, but rather, as the name implies, it's a host for other services. In other words, it's not necessarily Windows misbehaving, but a particular piece of software you're running. Find the PID of the svchost.exe process that's eating CPU in Task Manager. Then go to the Service tab of Task Manager and find the service with that PID. You'll have your actual culprit of what's eating CPU. It COULD be a Windows service that's acting up, but it's just as likely some 3rd party service.
imtringued 3y ago
I remember DCOM starting up on windows vista and then immediately hogging 100% of the CPU for the first 5 minutes after booting. Nobody uses DCOM, not even back then.

kogir 3y ago

svchost.exe is literally what the name implies. It's a generic service host. You pass it a dll and an entrypoint (via command line arguments and registry keys) and it runs it. You should look at which thing it's actually running to see what's using all your CPU. Some articles detailing what it does and how it works: [1] https://nasbench.medium.com/demystifying-the-svchost-exe-process-and-its-command-line-options-508e9114e747 https://nasbench.medium.com/demystifying-the-svchost-exe-pro... [2] https://pusha.be/index.php/2020/05/07/exploration-of-svchost-exe-p-flag/ https://pusha.be/index.php/2020/05/07/exploration-of-svchost... [3] https://blog.didierstevens.com/2019/10/29/quickpost-running-a-service-dll/ https://blog.didierstevens.com/2019/10/29/quickpost-running-...

atlas_hugged 3y ago
I went to help desk cuz I was being lazy, but Help desk was unfortunately kind of useless. They just wanted to reimage my machine and I haven’t had the time to go that route yet. I’m always busy. I did a bit of investigating with ProcMon recently but I really need to spend more time on it. As always, it comes down to time with these things. These articles were great by the way! I’ve never gotten significantly down and dirty in svchost, so these were a treat to read. I much appreciate the effort in your response. Have a pleasant day!

RamRodification 3y ago

> my work machine with 32GB of RAM is constantly being eaten alive by svchost.exe and the only thing I can do is reboot once a day Maybe you're self-employed and unsuccessful in troubleshooting this yourself, but that sounds like a five-minutes-with-a-first-line-support-technician problem. If you don't have a tech support department to turn to (or if they are incompetent), investigate the process with ProcessExplorer from Sysinternals to find out what that service host process is running and go from there. The industry is still on Windows because it's easier to manage in a corporate setting. And usually better for software compatibility.

sidewndr46 3y ago
This presupposes that identifying the problem is the 1st step to fixing it. In many professional settings, convincing someone that the problem needs to be fixed is the actual problem to solve. I had a near equivalent problem where my Windows desktop was brought to its knees by an instance of Glassfish running on it by some sort of policy. We did embedded development, low level stuff like data plane processing via FPGA. Internal IT spent 1/2 an hour trying to convince me that Glassfish was an essential part of my development stack. I never bothered to convince them to solve the morning 9 AM virus scan of every file on disk. I just hung out in the break room for the 45 minutes it took while the UI was almost totally useless
- vundercind 3y ago
  At some point you just have to accept that if an employer really, really, really insists on paying you to do nothing while they prevent you from using a vital tool they issued you... well, that must be what they want. They're paying the bills and are in control of that entire chain of decision-making, after all. Let 'em pay for it if that's what they want.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    That’s an infantile attitude, you are suppose to take responsibility for your work environment. Speak to the manager of your manager, and if that doesn’t work, to the manager of the manager of the manager. If that does not work, write a handwritten letter to the CEO and deliver it. If the CRO knew about this, they would definitely fix it! Don’t forget a a wax seal, they love those!
    - vundercind 3y ago
      Oh, you should try. I just don't think heroic efforts are in order. If you say "hey, this thing is wasting a bunch of my time, are you sure you want to do that?" and they say "yes"... well, alright.
atlas_hugged 3y ago

kikokikokiko 3y ago

In my case (non US, government owned IT company), they make every developer use Windows because someone is getting paid to make the purchase, that's it. Once the machines arrive, every single dev erases the OS and put his preferred version of Linux on it. And that's why my country is the s*t hole it is.

stephenr 3y ago

> I wish my company would just standardize on some supported variant of a Linux Desktop I mean, it doesn't sound like your current windows desktop is particularly supported.

atlas_hugged 3y ago
Haha this is true. Help desk is of the “not going to waste time and just re-image” mentality, so I decided not to nuke the next couple days of productivity setting it all back up. With Linux these gremlins tend to be a bit less of a problem in my, gosh 20 years of IT experience. 20 years, wow! Am I really that old? Dear god. Where does the time go?
- stephenr 3y ago
  Many moons ago my first job in the industry was working in an IT department for a technical college; this was the days of windows 98/xp and Novell netware; Even then unless it was a trivial issue, it was often a simpler fix to just re-image (or swap out hardware if we happened to have new ones available) - because most people had zero custom software installed (except for the 8 different IE toolbars they had somehow installed but swear appeared automatically) and after all, its windows: restoring from a clean image meant the machine would suddenly have that new car smell again and it'd likely last longer until the next issue would pop up. For people with custom software there was usually more leeway to troubleshoot problems - particularly if it was stuff that needed one-off configuration. I do feel your pain but having been on the other side of that fence I also feel their pain.

Workaccount2 3y ago

If linux (devs) could just swallow their pride and embrace some heavily windows influenced design choices I am confident linux could see widespread adoption. This would finally create the incentive for product developers to actually create and support linux based products. People really want to get away from windows. But they really really don't want to deal with an OS that feels like it's 1990.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> But they really really don't want to deal with an OS that feels like it's 1990. I'd rather a 1990 feel than the current feel where everything is flat and it's not obvious what's interactable and my 27" 4K monitor is 90% whitespace.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  In a linux terminal, -nothing- is obvious.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    Hah, that's a good point! Though it is possible to use Linux and never need the terminal, especially if you're not an engineer.
atlas_hugged 3y ago
You heard of wununtu? Or as the kids say “uWubuntu” Haha. Wait, what’s wrong with 90’s style? Check out how fast the 90’s style Serenity OS project is. It’s really something special they’re building.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

svchost.exe isn't a service itself, but rather, as the name implies, it's a host for other services. In other words, it's not necessarily Windows misbehaving, but a particular piece of software you're running. Find the PID of the svchost.exe process that's eating CPU in Task Manager. Then go to the Service tab of Task Manager and find the service with that PID. You'll have your actual culprit of what's eating CPU. It COULD be a Windows service that's acting up, but it's just as likely some 3rd party service.

imtringued 3y ago

I remember DCOM starting up on windows vista and then immediately hogging 100% of the CPU for the first 5 minutes after booting. Nobody uses DCOM, not even back then.