svchost.exe consuming ~200MB RAM

I find that one instance of svchost.exe consistently consumes around 200MB of RAM. I find this to be a problem at times as I do a lot of memory intensive work including Photoshop, etc. I've attached a screenshot showing the services attached to this particular process. Any idea which of these services might be a likely culprit? Are there any I can safely disable to free up some RAM? 200MB seems quite high for that.

seanr said:

...I find this to be a problem at times as I do a lot of memory intensive work including Photoshop, etc....

Is it actually being a problem, or are you just assuming it is a problem? Cause I can tell you, it doesn't matter how much RAM is being used by those services, as soon as Photoshop request it...it is given up instantly. So my advice, stop worrying about it, until it actually is a problem.

charles3 said:

I have one instance of svchost.exe that starts out at 300,000kb , and goes up. The “issue” (that I don't have a problem with) is superfetch sucks up a lot of memory (just to run/index) and it looks like superfetch is the one slurping up your memory.


Photoshop is a huge memory suckmonster, and so is superfetch. I have yet to have a system that won't have my resources strained by both of those. (look at my system stats and compare them to yours).

Both superfetch and Photoshop are (as far as memory, and CPU goes) shopaholics, and you might be cash poor (at 4 gigs and 2x 2.2ghz) depending on what you are doing .

My Photoshop/editing ubber workstation plan is to have a win7 box with 64 gig of memory, and 4 2.8 cores running on fast disk with bittchen graphics cards, supported by some beefy(over 20gb) 8 core (2.6ghz) render nodes. For me, that is what it takes not to be in “bog city”.

If you can't add more memory to your work box, can you place some of those tasks on render nodes?

If you go into a “front line” game factory, the small phoptoshop boxes have what you got, and the artists complain like they are "getting anvilgramed like Wiley E Woyote” if they have to work on anything over NTSC size. In general running photoshop on a laptop (as your stats indicate you have) is just asking for performance issues....

let us know when you wake up an smell the coffee

I don't care what resources the kernel uses, as long as all my programs can kick in and the memory is freed accordingly - you have to assume that the kernel is using resources optimally, in which case there's simply no issue!