Trying To Drill Down Into Generic Svchost - Need Help

I would think so as well. Why would you want to do this anyway?

FliGi7 said:

I would think so as well. Why would you want to do this anyway?

1. To see how much memory these services combined in one Svchost are each using.
2. To see if there are any services that I am not using that are taking up a lot of memory so that I can disable them if they can be safely disabled in Services. No reason to disable them if they are not using much memory. However, for example Windows Defender uses 72MB of memory on my x64 computers so I would disable it if I wasn't benefiting from it.

How much RAM (memory) to you have installed on your PC? Is that 4 GB in your specs accurate? How much memory is in use under normal conditions?

If you boot up your machine and your system uses about 1GB of RAM - this seems to be normal and I would not worry about it. You have plenty. Fine-tuning a few MB won't increase your performance at all. Moreover, even adding more memory might not be beneficial for you, unless you are running some really memory-intensive tasks (HD video editing, etc.). If you really want to increase your performance, you might look into the possibility of getting a SSD, but then I don't know your situation and whether you're actually considering any upgrades that you need to pay for.

My experience is, disabling service in 7 does not lead to any performance increase. I surely disable some of them, but then those are either really unnecessary (anybody can tell me why the Tablet PC services are active by default on a desktop?) or seem to be a security risk (such as NetBIOS or Remote Registry). Apart from that it seems best to leave the OS alone.

For your specific question, you might want to use Process Explorer from the Sysinternals suite.

1. If you read my post in its entirety you will see that I stated that I use Process Explorer. It does not drill down into Svchost to see how much memory each of the individual services that are linked to it use.

2. Its not just about memory and performance though that comes into play. For example my Internet Security Suites allows me to use "Persistent Cache" to speed up scans. Having more available physical memory improves the caching. Before going any further let me say that I know that computer performance is a very complicated subject and a lot of things can impact it. However having more free physical memory does not hurt performance.

3. The main reason for disabling unused services is a security one. The more services and programs that one uses, the greater the chance of having their system compromised. That is the main reason that I use only one Browser. Trying to learn about the security risks inherent in using your Browser and trying to protect those security holes becomes a lot more difficult if you use multiple Browsers.

It is the same way in personal relationships. It becomes a lot more complicated when you date multiple people especially if you are emotionally involved with more than one person. So to with your computer. The more software programs that we use and become emotionally involved with the more difficult it is too manage them without screwing up and having our computers comprised by the bad stuff out there. Yes, people become emotionally attached to their software programs and computers.

As they say, "Use it or lose it" or in this case "if you ain't using it lose it".

In my opinion just like it comes to no good carrying around dead weight on your body and in relationships it also comes to no good having your computer load and run software that you don't use. It is all unnecessary bloatware and having it in your life leads to more bad than good.

People can argue all day long about my position which is fine. What I can say is that this philosophy works just fine for me.

Buddahfan said:

2. Its not just about memory and performance though that comes into play. For example my Internet Security Suites allows me to use "Persistent Cache" to speed up scans. Having more available physical memory improves the caching. Before going any further let me say that I know that computer performance is a very complicated subject and a lot of things can impact it. However having more free physical memory does not hurt performance.

It doesn't hurt performance but does it in fact help the security and efficiency of the computer? I don't think you know the answer to this and are playing with fire on this one. Separating a process out into its own separate memory area and parent could certainly affect the level of its security. Compound this with the fact that you're altering the way it has to communicate now with other processes in the svchost parent it came from. You now have introduced more overhead to message passing since it's not sharing the same memory space and inter-process message passing technique.

Also, do you know how Svchost manages its subprocesses? Do you know if it has a mechanism for preventing unwanted processes from going haywire or becoming compromised in a certain fashion? If it does, you will be losing that by separating a subprocess out.

There are lot of things you are missing here that don't align with your philosophy of making things better by removing them or separating them. Personally, I think you're getting into a game where the odds of winning by seeing any actual measurable increase is greatly encompassed by the odds of losing by screwing something up that you're not knowledgeable about. I'm all for improving performance, but the reason and way you're going about it is not going to achieve it.