svchost instances and ram

Grab a copy of Process Explorer from Microsoft and as you move the mouse over each running svchost process it will show the services its running



It shouldn't be running that many svchost instances but I suspect its a non-Microsoft service launching multiple copies of itself, give it a try and let us know whats running behind a majority of the svchost instances

Steven

Chappy said:

Hey

I have to disagree that BlackVipers info is useful, it can be rather deceiving and many times down right destructive.

We did months of testing all the way back to XP pre SP1 and all the way to Vista release. Over 49 people took place in these tests and over time the groups that applied the various recommended service "tweaks" had an average of 46% more unknown problematic errors than the non tweaked groups.
Also found that the average RAM savings by stopping these services was UNDER 40MB at best. CPU savings were unmeasureable, basically...none.
Background services for the most part sit there doing nothing so consuming no CPU resources, and even with all default services on, the difference in RAM is a drop in the bucket on almost any system with over 512MB RAM. Most of them reside in the Page file area and not in Physical RAM.

Besides the drastic increase in "Unknown" error types, most of the tweaked group also found external devices (and some internal) that didn't work as expected, mainly due to them forgetting exactly what they tweaked so many months before, and many days/weeks up to months passed before they found that a disabled service was involved in those problems. Turning the services back on resolved the issues usually...what does that tell us.

It should all tell us that using these service tweaks on any machine newer than...oh, around 2000, simply don't need these tweaks and in many cases they may cause issues that are hard(er) to resolve
In fact there are probably only 2 or 3 services that could cause a security risk and MS has had those turned off by default since XP SP2. There really is no need for these tweaks unless you like to troubleshoot mysterious problems, or like to diagnose why certain devices and features suddenly don't work propery anymore...

There is plenty of reliable info on what I've said out there, from very top techs (many of whom took parts in our testing).

I agree 100 percent. I did many tests of my own using the Black Viper site as a guide and found that disabling a few services did absolutely nothing for performance. That guide is useless for the most part and potentially destructive as well.

I have found through my own testing that disabling nearly every service was the only way to gain any performance advantage when bench testing things like Vantage or other game benches. Of course you can't run the OP system like that so I only used "services" in Windows which would disable things only until the next restart. Windows 7 doesn't use much Ram and the CPU meter sits on 00 for hours on end. There is no need to tweak it.:)