How can I analyze the CPU usage that is associated with a Windows thread or service? Sometimes my dual processor CPU will show 49% CPU usage for task SVCHOST - for example, yesterday it used 49% for over three hours. Now it's doing it again today.  Using Task Manager, if you right-click on the task and select 'Go To Service(s)' it will identify 18 services, but no detail for each. I have tried 'Process Explorer v16.2', but still no breakdown.   Scanned for Malware, SpyBot, Virus = all clean.  Looked at all of the system log's - nothing stood out.  Boot in Safe Mode, problem seems to go away. Tried to install Windows SDK for WinDbg, but it fails with    error. I am running Windows Vista (I can actually feel the groan - it is so loud! Long story, but my PC really does run as great as the day I bought it.)   New Info: I decided to go down the list of services running under the SVCHOST task and stop each service until either CPU decreased, or I crashed windows. When I stopped 'Windows Update', CPU went to normal.  After hours of searching for known issues, and attempting to apply solutions, the problem persisted. For the short term, I decided to set Windows Update to 'Manual Start' DO NOT DO THAT UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND THE RISKS!!!  My original need was to be able to identify the service using the high CPU by using some type of monitor. Although I got around that need, I would still like to know if such a tool exists.
120734
Update I was able to get Readiness Tool to run but not the update Now the reediness tool will not even run Security Essentials will run    I have legal Windows 7 to install Do you think that is safe bet to try?    Had some performance issue so I ran MalwareBytes and Security Essentials.     It found some malware that was successfully removed.    I was able to Update Security Essentials and I ran it again for safety and it found nothing additions.     The last successful Windows Update was 5 days ago     Checking for Updates has been running 6 hours CPU 100%  network 0%     Windows6.0-KB947821-v35-x86.mnu fails to install It is supposed to be a tool to address update problems   I fear the registry got hacked to prevent updates     What can I do?  I know Vista.  I got it free.
90222
I'm running a few VMs, and suddenly I noticed my CPU fan was spinning louder than usual. I tracked it down to Windows 8 doing some "automatic maintenance":      How can I turn this completely off? I found a way to set the time, but not a way to turn it off completely.
75925
When I login, I notice many process quickly start and terminate in task manager. But it happens very fast and I cannot save details about them (like process name, command line, CPU usage,..)  How can I collect stats about them so I can view them later
98592
How does Windows processor affinity work with hyperthreaded CPUs? Let's use an example (pictured) of a system with four cores, each with a hyper-threaded virtual core.  Which cores correspond to each &quot;CPU&quot; below? Does (say) CPU 6 and CPU 7 below represent one core; the HT and the real core? If, for example, CPU 6 represents a real core and CPU 7 an HT core, will a thread assigned just to just CPU7 get only the left over resources of a real core? (assuming the core is running other tasks) Is the hyperthreading managed entirely within the processor such that threads are juggled internally? If so, is that at the CPU scope or the core scope? Example: If CPU 6 and 7 represent one core, does it not matter which a process is assigned to because the CPU will assign resources as appropriate to a running thread? I notice that long-running single-threaded processes are bounced around cores quite a bit, at least according to task manager. Does this mean that assigning a process to a single core will improve performance by a little bit (by avoiding context switches and cache invalidations, etc.)? If so, can I know I am not assigning to &quot;just a virtual core&quot;?  This is all very vague and confusing to me. HT is great, but it sure seems to reduce the transparency of resource allocation.
50689
I am facing a load average of > 3 since past 2 days. The CPU utilization is never above 40 % in all cases. Here are some screenshots of Server Density monitoring tool that I use.    The process snapshot at the highest peak, @ 0:00 is as follows:   And the process snapshot at the peak created at 12:00 is:   My question is, even though CPU utilization is not 100 %, why am I facing a high average?  PS: All snapshots are sorted by descending CPU utilization.
43574
I have noticed this on many different Windows machine, on many different occasions: the RAM usage reported by Task Manager or Resource Monitor often seems to add up to an amount which is significantly lower than the actual amount in use.  For example, many times on my laptop or my desktop, I have seen something like 7GB in use, and yet the total of the Working RAM Set is more like 3GB. I just can't figure out where it's being used!  Here's an extreme example I noticed today in Resource Monitor on a server:    If you right-click the image and open in a new tab, and view the numbers, you'll notice that the Working Set (which doesn't include nonphysical virtual memory) add up to about 1.7GB. I get similar numbers by adding up RAM usage in Task Manager when "Show processes from all users" is enabled.  Now here's a screenshot of task manager's Performance tab:    This says 7.6GB of physical memory is in use.  I see this all the time, on personal computers, laptops, and now servers: the total RAM usage reported by system tools only accounts for about 1/4 of the RAM usage I observe. WTF is going on???  Is there any satisfying explanation of where all my RAM is? What is gobbling it up, and why is it leaving no trace?  EDIT: Here's a picture of the graphical RAM use, as user whs asked for:    EDIT 2: In response to James' response, here's a picture of the nonpaged processes in poolmon.exe, sorted by size:    These results confuse me. poolmon correctly states that I have 6GB of nonpaged pool in use, but all the nonpaged pool processes are less than 8MB in size.  What could this mean? Is poolmon failing to detect some of the processes using the nonpaged pool?
17306
How are these fundamentally different &quot;things&quot; on Windows? Aren't all running things Processes? It seems that every Application has an associated process that shuts it down if it is shut down. It looks like one process can manage more than one application instance. And Services, I'm not even sure what they are, exactly. Are they not processes themselves?
120067
I have windows 8.1 64 bit, 8Gb ram.  My Task Manager shows 49% used ram, but I still get messages like "Windows is low memory, we recomend to close application". It always says that about the application which is not currently active, but uses more memory than other processes (when Firefox is up, it is Firefox, otherwise it's Skype).  So my question is: how to setup threshold or how to force Windows not report about low memory?  Note: even when it has 70+% free it still reports about low memory. Number of application running doesn't metter.  Note 2: it doesn't happen when I start new app. Looks like windows have some memory checker and it pops up that message on regular basis when swap off. It minimizes active apps(games or browser) and show me that weird message.
87925
I'm currently running Ubuntu 14.04.2 Desktop.  The System Monitor tool is showing me 32 CPUs when I'm expecting 56. Should I be concerned?  Screenshot of System Monitor:    As you can see, it shows 32 CPUs.  Output of lscpu:  ~$ lscpu Architecture:          x86_64 CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order:            Little Endian CPU(s):                56 On-line CPU(s) list:   0-55 Thread(s) per core:    2 Core(s) per socket:    14 Socket(s):             2 NUMA node(s):          2 Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel CPU family:            6 Model:                 63 Stepping:              2 CPU MHz:               1337.882 BogoMIPS:              5189.07 Virtualization:        VT-x L1d cache:             32K L1i cache:             32K L2 cache:              256K L3 cache:              35840K NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-13,28-41 NUMA node1 CPU(s):     14-27,42-55   As you can see, according to lscpu, I should have 56 CPUs.  htop is also showing me 56 CPUs.    My machine is . It has 2 Intel Xeon E5-2697 V3 processors, each having 14 cores and capable of 2 threads per core (as seen in the output of lscpu, and further confirmed in BIOs).  I recall seeing 56 cores under System Monitor when I launched it in the "try ubuntu" mode from the installation disk before installing Ubuntu.   Is there something wrong with my system configuration? If there is (e.g., hardware failure), what can I do to verify? Also, I noticed that my System Monitor does not have a "System" tab.
82280
I've a windows 10 copy running in my core i5 second gen laptop. Now there is this issue where the hard disk usage goes to 100% and the system doesn't respond for a few seconds to even few minutes. I've run process monitor, resource monitor and found that the system uses the disk so much. This doesn't happen when the pc is on idle rather, if I open a folder or any other window, the hard disk usage spikes to 100% and be there for a long time! which is unusual.   I looked at the event log and there I saw a lot of events with the following message.  The start type of the Windows Modules Installer service was changed from demand start to auto start   I couldn't find what is wrong with the system. I use bitdefender 2015 antivirus and tried switching it off. Then again I disabled windows search, indexing service and all possible solutions I could find over the internet. Installed Ccleaner and did a registry clean and a system cleanup. Nothing worked and now the system is unusable! I cannot re - install windows since I don't have most of the software I've already installed.   If it helps the laptop is a Dell Inspiron n5110. Please help me..
10176
There are many answers here detailing programs that will monitor and log internet usage for a pc, but I need that usage to be logged and broken down, detailing which applications consumed that data.  I've noted there are several that give a real-time feed of each application's data usage (NetLimiter, Win7 Resource Monitor), but I can't find one that will log such data.  Anyone know of one?  Need to track down which program is using up a friend's bandwidth!
62901
I have been feeling this way for a while, looking at task manager mentally ballparking how much physical memory should be in use, and noticing a large disparity. I finally got around to measuring it. Taking the results of tasklist and adding, gave about 3.87 GB. Task manager told me I was using 4.6 GB of memory. This seems like a large disparity. Where did it go?  EDIT: So its clear, it is not going to prefetch. It has also been suggested that its part of the OS, but not part of any of the system processes. If this is true, please find a way to get the OS to tell me how much memory is getting used. Since I want to find out where the memory went, asking me to look at the difference does nothing for me.  EDIT 2: It is not the following:   The kernel The cache Hardware reserved memory   Picture of resources taken up. Not quite sure what it will do but...
76640
VirtualBox, and possibly other VM software, allows the user to specify the number of CPUs exposed to the VM. In my particular case, I have a dual core CPU, with Windows 7 64-bit running natively, and Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit as the VM.  The help file suggests not setting this above the number of physical cores available. This makes sense. So, is it best allocating 1 or 2 CPU cores? Does this depend entirely on the native CPU load?
75899
Basically, I want to track which processes are running and their cpu % throughout the day to pinpoint random freezing and slowness. I would like to go in to a text file and see a log of the previous days processes, or something to that effect.
87784
Can anyone explain how Windows effectively limits the CPU?  Last time I tried some tricks to let my laptop not overheat, so I tried limiting the CPU to 70%.   As for my suprise it stopped my laptop from overheating - even when launching CPU intensive applications which caused my laptop to overheat and shut down, didn't overheat my laptop anymore!  I looked at task manager but the "CPU intensive" application still uses ~95% of CPU and the windows task manager shows a total of 100% CPU usage.  I have limited the CPU usage here ("plugged in" option was on 70% [both min and max] when testing the CPU intensive application):    How does Windows do this magic?   I see 100% CPU usage yet my CPU does not overheat. And I do not see any performance differences.  Does Windows limit the CPU speed? Like, if I have a 2.4 GHz processor, on 70% it will only have 1.68 GHz when limited? How is this possible (changing the CPU speed)? I thought you can only underclock when in BIOS?  If not, how does Windows accomplish this if not by changing the speed?    Side question: If it's about the speed, is there a way to set the CPU max state to 200% ?
84271
Typically, my kernel_task process uses 1-4% CPU and 100-700MB of memory. However, sometimes when I have the power adapter plugged in, the CPU usage jumps to around 500% (8 cores) and stays there until I unplug the power adapter. I can plug it back in and everything is fine for a few seconds or a few days, then it eventually happens again. How can I stop this from happening?
19649
I've installed Process Lasso and in All processes tab, set all affinities to 1-7, meaning that all the processes can be start on all my CPUs except the first one. Yet, there is a huge load on my first CPU.   I personally have no clue what's happening here and really appreciate any help.  My system is:   Intel core i7 - 4720 HQ  2.6 GHz upto 3.6 Windows 10 (64 bit) NVidia GTX 950 M   This screenshot, shows the software's interface. Those 8 green bars on upper right show my CPU usage. Also the column called Rules, indicates the affinities on the processes.       PS: These are screenshots that show the more familiar Task Manager and Resource Monitor. I've sorted all with respect to their CPU usage. Note that the overall CPU usage is just fine (less than 30% most of the time), but in Resource Monitor, same as the Process Lasso, it's obvious that that most of the load is on CPU0 and the others are almost free.  Also I found out that my total CPU usage, is actually more than all my processes altogether! The orange line in Resource Monitor picture, shows the amount of CPU usage of all my processes. (I did the same in safe mode. Orange line, exactly coincides the total usage in safe mode. So I'm suspecting that something is happening in my normal boot.)