Win7Pro svchost.exe service spiking to 50% for extended periods of time with Fusion 8.1.1

[speedracer64]

Win7Pro svchost.exe service (one of many running simultaneously) is spiking to 50% for extended periods of time with Fusion 8.1.1 and is slowing down my VM.

This wasn't happening with Fusion 8.1.0 and I haven't changed anything else in the configuration I have.

I'm running a MacBookPro Retina 15-inch, Mid 2014) model with 16GB RAM, 512MB SSD with an external HDMI-attached monitor.

Fusion is allocated 8GB RAM and 2 vCPUs and 96GB vDisk.  I have Accelerate 3D Graphics turned off, although I've had it on before and I still have weird graphics issues with my Netformx DesignXpert program all the time either way (separate complaint with Fusion).

any ideas why this might be happening?

thank you,

John

[RickShu]

Hi speedrace64,

I was unable to reproduce your issue in Fusion 8.1.1. I've compared with Fusion 8 and did not see any difference about performance in Windows 7 guest.

Are there any applications (especially background programs like Anti-Virus software or Windows itself) which are running when you saw the CPU spikes?

My personal suggestions are either re-install the VMware Tools or increase the number vCPUs for your Windows 7 VM.

Regards,

-Rick

[wila]

Hello,

I see this about once a month...

For background please read the following thread:

https://communities.vmware.com/message/2579410#2571427

The process "svchost -k netsvcs" is called by windows update and nowadays takes a long long time to complete.

This process is active while your windows is checking if it has outstanding updates.

At that time one core is completely tied up (eg. 100% on 1 core)

Adding more cpu's to your guest OS won't fix that, instead you'll make CPU scheduling harder and thus might end up with unresponsiveness on guest and/or host.

What does fix it, is running windows update so that no more critical updates are out there.

After reboot, it will run one more time and then the high cpu usage is done for a month.

As svchost is used more things, there might be another explanation, but this is my guess.

hope this helps,

--

Wil

[speedracer64]

Thanks Wil.

and especially for that thread re: taskmgr and the command line option. I have used taskmgr forever and did not know about that option. it clarifies what all those svchost services are running for - at least what the command line options are.

and it was the 'netsvcs' option that has been the culprit for me.

I just ran windows update again. It took forever for it to start downloading the updates (not sure why), but eventually did the job.

I will keep an eye on it and hopefully it is as you said - I will be free of that for at least a month.

I do try to keep my windows update up to date on a regular basis anyway.

thanks again for the quick response.

John

[wila]

Hello,

I'm not sure either why it is that slow, but do see the same on both Window 7 and Windows 8, they are pretty slow on the update (to put it mildly)

The conspiracy theory might be that Microsoft wants us to update to Windows 10.

The more likely scenario is just that it has to test the full list of updates that have been processed before in a time ascending way.

Sometimes I do see Windows update to rerun an update I installed ages ago which would support the latter theory.

You can also see the log files grow on this in C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log during the Windows Update.

That log tend to grow quite big nowadays before it gets rolled over on a reboot and archived into a cab file again.

Anyways I'm digressing, hope the svchost process calmed down on your end.

--

Wil

[ColoradoMarmot]

I get this regularly - I kill the process a couple of times and it finally goes away.

[uocdonald]

I created a batch script to run on startup and clear all event viewer logs which kept svchost to minimum following suggestions at https://appuals.com/how-to-fix-high-cpu-usage-by-svchost-exe-netsvcs/

[ColoradoMarmot]

Fixing the windows update problems (in another thread - link not handy), solves this issue too.

[wila]

Hi,

I think this is the link dlhotka refers to:

Re: Can anyone suggest a fix for Windows 7 updates failing?

--

Wil

[jessica951]

svchost.exe

consumes maximum CPU usage, To resolve the high CPU usage issue, check this solution: http://errorcodespro.com/fix-svchost-exe-netsvcs-high-cpu-memory-usage/