svchost Memory Leak - Windows Update

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Anybody else seeing this?

https://social.technet.microsoft.co...fd1a5b4/windows-update-scan-high-memory-usage

For the last couple of months I have been seeing 2gig windows 7 machines coming in droves. WU svchost process will eat .75 to 2G of ram for extended periods of time. Computer becomes unusable.

I am seeing this behavior on about 30% of all windows machines coming in, but machine with 4+ GB of memory seem to plow through it better.

It seems to affect people that shut their computer down all the time the worst, because it tends to start happening within 5 minutes of boot. Machine I just put on the bench went 30 minutes before memory dropped back down.

Some suggested work-arounds are running windows update in its own svchost like this:

sc config wuauserv type= own

On some machines it helps, but many it does not.

Supposedly MS is working on a patch, but this has been going on for months now.

I would suspect many of you might not even be aware this is happening. For me personally, these days I do not pay alot of attention to memory use. I start my automated tools, walk away, and by the time I go hands on the machine, the issue is dormant. My techs at my other store started complaining about it a couple of weeks before I started to notice. Then one day I had 6 2G Dell Vostros come in, in one day, all complaining about the same symptoms. A week later had a church singing songs and powerpoint slides were taking 10 seconds to change on an i7 with 2G
 
Two in the past week.
It's frustrating trying to get them to perform decently especially, the crappy budget cpu models as the process seems to also eat about quarter of the cpu at the same time as it's eating the ram.
 
We STRONGLY suggest memory upgrades for any machine running 2GB. It's just not enough these days with modern a/vs growing and growing, TSRs numbering a dozen or more, on and on with processes battling for RAM. 2GB machines really need upgrades to at least 4GB. I wouldn't count on MS solving the issue anytime soon. We see it as well and I forget the processes they're running but they're necessary and can't be terminated. Stock up on RAM memory and push upgrades is what we did to solve the issue.
 
Yes to some 2gb Win7 machines doing this. I see it especially after a Windows update that does anything with .NET. When a machine goes to .NET 452 it can take forever on some machines. After that it will do a few more .net updates over the next day or two and same slowdown. The amount of ram being used goes upward of 1 gb just for the update/mscorsvw/etc. I had to turn off WU on one customers machine because he could not go above 2gb and it was a nightmare. I told him how to turn it back on and do updates but I doubt he ever will again.
 
We STRONGLY suggest memory upgrades for any machine running 2GB. It's just not enough these days with modern a/vs growing and growing, TSRs numbering a dozen or more, on and on with processes battling for RAM. 2GB machines really need upgrades to at least 4GB.

Agree. And those machines that are running 64-bit Windows will get the benefit immediately. But a number of the machines we've seen with 2GB are running 32-bit Windows. It's tough to recommend a N&P along with the memory bump.
 
Yes we came across this yesterday, again 64bit with 2GB. Tried all the fixes suggested and more but still happening. Fun times.
 
Anybody else seeing this?

Yup....I replied in some post about it a few months ago....our tech was stuck rebuilding some Win7 rig with only 1 gig of RAM...on a fresh nuke 'n pave, first round of Winders updates and she went into a coma. A week later I think he had a second one doing that...again..fresh clean nuke 'n pave. And with just 2 gigs...I've seen rigs get quite unusable.

Personally I won't torture myself sitting in front of any Win7 rig with 2 gigs or less....we really push for 8 gigs for rigs we sell, 4 gigs absolute minimum but it comes with a warning of "expect slowness".
 
I see it especially after a Windows update that does anything with .NET

Yes! And can you remove any of the old versions of .NET? Nooooo.... you should keep them sez MS. Even with sufficient RAM, it's still going to hammer the HDD. Then there are all the other MS/non-MS processes that want to horn in wrt updates/checking for updates.

They need to start shipping PCs with svchost co-processors or something. A utility that automatically finds the version of .NET that's compiling and forces it to just get on with it would help.
 
Just had one this morning. Machine comes in with customer report that boots ok but then get slower after 5-10 minutes until you cant do anything. Booted up machine, cleaned some usual junk, rebooted and left it for about 10 minutes. Sure enough svchost.exe was at 960meg ram, 93% or so. System was almost totally dead. Rebooted, did this patch, rebooted, let it settle and now I am not seeing a little more than120meg ram usage and system does not degrade over time.

I cant tell when this problem started happening, but I think we should expect more machines to come in like this. I have downloaded both the x86 and x64 versions and put them on my repairs usb sticks.
 
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