20 instances of svchost.exe. Supposed to be that many?

[The Bum]

Hey, I was just looking through my processes and noticed that I have 20 different instances of svchost.exe and I don't really think that there's supposed to be that many. It's not a huge problem, most of them use less than 10mb ram except for one using 90mb. But I really find it unusual that there are so many of them so I just thought I'd ask.

 

[whs]

That is not unusual. Run Process Explorer and hover over the processes. Then it will tell you what .dlls they serve. The reason they use so many is to spread the risk of system failure. If one goes down, it does not pull the whole system down but only those services that run under that particular svchost.exe.
Here is some more info: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/what-is-svchostexe-and-why-is-it-running/

 

[A Guy]

Besides the good info whs provided. All instances of svchost.exe should be in the system32 folder. If you find them anywhere else, that would be a red flag. A Guy

 

[The Bum]

Okay thanks, so it's safe Just got a bit concerned because I never really saw more than 3 or 4 when I used XP.