Figuring out why my SVCHOST.EXE is at 100% CPU without complicated tools in Windows 7

The SvcHost.exe process hosts services that run in the background on Windows. It's literally "Service Host." You may have a dozen services or more running inside that process. More complex is that you'll sometimes see multiple SvcHost.exe's in your TaskManager. 

Let me tell you now, Task Manager will not save you. You can see the PIDs for a running Service for the Services tab, but when a service goes insane, good luck nailing it down.

This inevitably leads you to questions like, "What Services are running inside what SvcHost.exe?" and "Which Service is using 100% CPU."

There's lots of ways to figure this out, but first I'll tell you that simply killing the SvcHost.exe process that is using the most CPU will also kill ALL the other services that were running inside that host process.

There's many command line ways to figure this stuff out, like

net start

or

sc query type= service

or

tasklist /svc

But this post is about doing it the easy way without lining up Process IDs and such.

Which Service is Freaking Out?

From the Start Menu, type "Resource Monitor" and run it.

Read more: Scott Hanselman

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