Solved Svchost.exe eating all my RAM

[Hayd]

I'd just like to add that by following HansFragger's advice, my usage instantly dropped from svchost using 600K+ of my 2GB RAM, to back where it should be at 65K.

I think if you're going to use a prefetch system, you need to have the computer free to run the program as well as the prefetch system!

Thanks HansFragger!

 

[dmalcom]

Hello Roberticus. I had the same problem. As I started to hunt down and kill the offending process, I booted , then opened task manager to the performance tab. I noticed two things. First, a svchost was gobbling up a huge amount of my 4 Gigs. Second, I looked to the area that shows total memory, cached, and free. 5 megs a second was moving from free to cached until there was only 8 megs listed as free!. Then I started shutting down services in the local services box( Start-All Programs-Administrative tools-services) until I caught the perpetrator red handed! Vista has a service(more like a dis-service), that supposedly "maintains and improves system performance over time". I have yet to notice any speed improvements, but if you load a sidebar gadget to monitor cpu usage you will see each core fluctuating from 0 to 7% and also look at your hard drive activity light going nuts while its beating your hard drive to death. Press stop in the services page on Superfetch and watch your cpu usage stop, and your hard drive takes a break, and best of all your memory stops being "gobbled up!!!". Then double click on superfetch. When the properties box comes up, change the startup to manual, select apply, reboot and you will have all of the memory you paid for with your hard earned money! After I stopped Superfetch and rebooted, I was showing 586 MB's cached and approx 3300 mb's free.

Have a great one!

I know this is an extremely old thread, however I recently aquired a vista computer for free because it was "extremely slow" I am glad I found this thread and was willing to do a little reading, I noticed that the svchost was off the charts (200k-300k but I am not even sure this was an accurate representation) your solution fixed it instantly. I completely disabled Superfetch and it was instantly fixed, 32k usage instead of the off the charts numbers from before. Bravo, just wanted to thank you for helping me fix a free computer I expected to be riddled with viruses and unusable.

 

[LMiller7]

I know this is an extremely old thread, however I recently aquired a vista computer for free because it was "extremely slow" I am glad I found this thread and was willing to do a little reading, I noticed that the svchost was off the charts (200k-300k but I am not even sure this was an accurate representation) your solution fixed it instantly. I completely disabled Superfetch and it was instantly fixed, 32k usage instead of the off the charts numbers from before. Bravo, just wanted to thank you for helping me fix a free computer I expected to be riddled with viruses and unusable.

I normally avoid posting in old threads but in this case I will make an exception.

The idea that a large amount of free memory is necessary or desirable is a very old idea, but one that is hopelessly outdated. In any modern OS (and any version of Windows released in the last 20 years) a guiding principle is that memory was meant to be used. Actually the concept dates back to the 1960's but that is for another time. Unused memory is wasted memory. Years of research and more testing than you could imagine has confirmed this principle as valid.

One problem in Windows versions prior to Vista was that there was often a large amount of free memory. Yes, this is a problem. These old systems did not show free memory in any normal utility but it could be seen in a kernel debugger. Memory sitting idle is a crime against performance.

Superfetch is one way that otherwise unused memory is put to useful work. It generally works well. Memory used for Superfetch is immediately available to any process that needs it, no less than if it were free. The normal state for memory not labeled as in use is Standby, which includes that used for Superfetch. Free memory should always be low, zero being the optimum value. Unfortunately we are not there yet and free memory is often unavoidable.