Terminating problem services

Your system seems sluggish, so you open Task Manager, select the Processes tab, click Show Processes From All Users, and observe that one of the svchost.exe processes consumes a lot of CPU for long periods of time. What can you do? Here’s a quick and dirty way of troubleshooting the problem which may be useful to try if your system isn’t mission-critical to your business:

  1. Right-click on the problem svchost.exe process and select Go To Service(s). This will switch you to the Services tab and will highlight all of the services hosted within the svchost.exe process.
  2. Right-click on one of the identified services and select Stop to stop the service. Switch back to the Processes tab to see if the CPU usage has dropped to normal.
  3. If the CPU usage remains high, repeat the above two steps until you have identified which service is causing the problem.
  4. Open a command prompt and use the sc config command to isolate the problem service into its own svchost.exe instance. Now you can simply kill this svchost.exe instance should the problem ever occur again.

Of course, a much better way of approaching this kind of problem is to use Xperf to get a trace of what’s happening on your system. Here’s a post by Jeff Stokes that shows you how:
http://www.wservernews.com/go/1347018824365

The above tip was previously published in an issue of WServerNews, a weekly newsletter from TechGenix that focuses on the administration, management and security of the Windows Server platform in particular and cloud solutions in general. Subscribe to WServerNews today by going to http://www.wservernews.com/subscribe.htm and join almost 100,000 other IT professionals around the world who read our newsletter!

Mitch Tulloch is an eleven-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award and a widely recognized expert on Windows Server and cloud computing technologies.  Mitch is also Senior Editor of WServerNews. For more information about him see http://www.mtit.com.

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