Auslogics Blog

Svchost.exe is known to cause high CPU usage problems. I’m sure you’ve been in a situation like this: you’re working on your computer and enjoying yourself when all of a sudden it becomes agonizingly slow and even starts freezing up. You press CTRL+ALT+DEL to open the Task Manager, click on the Processes tab,  and see that there are several instances of svchost.exe running and one of them is using up 90% – 100% of CPU! Some people will think: “Oh no! My computer’s got a virus!!!”. Well, that might be true, because some malware pretends to be svchost, but most likely it’s just Windows being Windows.

So, what does svchost.exe do and why is it there in the first place? Svchost is there to host services and run DLLs. You might have noticed that most programs have their own .exe files and can run on their own. DLLs are different – they can’t launch themselves. That’s why svchost.exe exists – it launches and runs DLLs. You can check out the FileInspect Process Library to find out more about the svchost.exe process.

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