Periodically I'll get a crash from svchost, or suddenly my disk starts churning, or svchost is suddenly taking 90% of CPU. If it happens repeatedly I can usually figure out the culprit, but there's no reason it should happen at all through this mystery fucking obfuscation/anonymization host.
1/24/2010
01-24-10 - svchost
Fucking Windows and the way it runs services is the bane of my computing life. If it wasn't for that, XP would be near
perfect. Every time I have a computer problem these days it's because of some fucking mystery shit happening in svchost.
And I have no easy way to track down WTF is happening or block it. I cannot for the life of me figure out a good reason
why they did that instead of just making each service its own process, which I could then diagnose, block, verify was
legitimate, etc.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
old rants
-
►
2012
(34)
-
►
March
(12)
- 03-29-12 - Computer Notes to Self
- 03-28-12 - The Internet is Broken Part 714
- 03-27-12 - DXT is not enough
- 03-12-12 - Comparing Compressors
- 03-10-12 - GDC Stereotypes
- 03-09-12 - Good Things about GDC
- 03-08-12 - Oodle Coroutines
- 03-06-12 - The Worker Wake and Semaphore Delay Iss...
- 03-06-12 - Oodle Handle Table - WFMO
- 03-05-12 - Oodle Handle Table
- 03-04-12 - GDC
- 03-03-12 - Stranger's Wrath HD
-
►
January
(12)
- 01-27-12 - Some Game Reviews
- 01-24-12 - Protectionism Part 3
- 01-18-12 - Stop SOPA but don't stop there
- 01-16-12 - Some TV Reviews
- 01-09-12 - LZ Optimal Parse with A Star Part 5
- 01-09-12 - Protectionism Part 2
- 01-07-12 - Protectionism
- 01-06-12 - Surveying is a Powder Keg
- 01-06-12 - Nice Wiring Bub
- 01-04-12 - Two laws you should hate
- 01-04-12 - Police Brutality
- 01-04-12 - Double Pane Glass is a scam
-
►
March
(12)
-
►
2011
(237)
-
►
December
(13)
- 12-20-11 - Grocery Store Lines
- 12-19-11 - SRAM
- 12-17-11 - LZ Optimal Parse with A Star Part 4
- 12-17-11 - LZ Optimal Parse with A Star Part 3
- 12-17-11 - LZ Optimal Parse with A Star Part 2
- 12-12-11 - Things I want and cannot find
- 12-12-11 - Sense
- 12-09-11 - Kittens
- 12-08-11 - Some Semaphores
- 12-05-11 - Surprising Producer-Consumer Failures
- 12-03-11 - Worker Thread system with reverse depen...
- 12-03-11 - RAD - Hawaii Branch
- 12-02-11 - Natural Expression
-
►
December
(13)
4 comments:
Procexp can tell you which services are running in a given svchost. Does that help?
Mark Russinovich's (the author of procexp) blog is full of interesting tidbits on debugging the internals of Windows. I followed this particular blog entry once to discover which driver was causing constant disk access (it was just showing up as IO in the "system" process or lsass.exe or something).
1) viruses
2) /windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts being too big (many security software put hundreds of site addresses in here, which makes svhost take 100% of the cpu). Either clean this up or disable the "DNS Client" service.
3) Windows bug: once in a while on my office computer, svhost and lots of services would crash after I log in.
They fold into a single process because when the system was designed (early'ish NT days) the overhead from each additional process was to great to seperate stuff so heavily.
If it's crashing, load the dump in windbg to check the call stack.
But it is time to move on from xp. Windows 7 or bust.
Post a Comment