Troubleshooting svchost processes that eat up processor time
As you can see from the screenshot above, I have a svchost process that is killing my CPU and hogging most of its time. However, since the svchost process is generic and is a container for services on your computer, what is unknown is what exact service is this svchost process running.
In order to troubleshoot to see which service is contained in this instance of svchost, notice its PID (Process ID). Then open up a command window (Start>Run>cmd) and type
” tasklist /svc “
That should give you a list that looks like this:
Notice the entry for svchost.exe with the same PID (Process ID) as the one that is causing trouble. In my case, the instance of svchost causing trouble is hosting 13 different services (talk about unlucky numbers). From here on, simply try shutting each service down and see if it leads to an effect on your performance. In order to selectively shut down each service individually, open a new command window and type-
” net stop <myservice> “
Example: net stop CscService
If you do not see a performance increase after shutting down an individual service then simply turn it back on and move on to the next one. To turn the service back on, use the same command as above but replace ’stop’ with ’start’-
net start CscService
Once you actually do find the rogue service, you can disable it from starting the next time you turn your computer on. To do this, go to Start > Run > services.msc and find the name of the rogue service. The name of the service can be learned from the command prompt where you turned it off. For example, when I type “net stop CscService”, the command prompt will echo “Stopping Offline Files Service”. That should tell you that the name of the service is “Offline Files” and this is what you should look for in the services.msc screen.
Once you find the rogue service in the services.msc screen, simply right click > Properties and choose to disable this service from the drop-down menu.