How to prevent services from consuming an excessive amount of CPU power ?

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The computer is the following :
Antec Performance One P182 (ATX, Geen PSU, Zwart)
Radeaon R7 200
Asus P5K Premium/Wifi-AP
8GB RAM
Intel Core 2 Duo E8600
Windows 7 Service Pack 1
2x Samsung SpinPoint T166, 500GB (7200rpm, SATA II, 16MB, NCQ)

It started with the CPU usage being higher than the sum of all the usages in the Task Manager. The culprit turned out to be greedy services. These can be seen with resmon.exe (in Windows/System32). I have recorded the behaviour over 45 days. The behaviour varies, but typically a service would monopolize an entire CPU.

Most common greedy services : cmdAgent (Comodo Internet Security Helper Service), wuauserv (Windows Update), WerSvc (Windows Error
Reporting Service), Wlansvc (WLAN AutoConfig), W32Time (Windows Time), TrustedInstaller (Windows Modules Installer) and TTService.

In resmon in the Services area one can right-click on a process and choose ‘Stop Service’. These things can happen then :
– Nothing
– I get an error message that I can’t stop the process.
– The status of the process changes to ‘Stopped’ and CPU usage by that process drops to 0. Then process may automatically restart.
– The status of the process changes to ‘Stopped’ and reported CPU usage (which may be false) by that process remains high.

Restarting processes is even less effective.

Lately after startup my CPU usage (2 processors) is at 90-95 %, even when according to resmon only one process (lately TTService is being voracious) is using up 1CPU. (So I don’t know where the extra 40% CPU power is being used). Stopping the process, if successful drops CPU usage to below 20%.

How can I prevent these processes from monopolizing an excessive amount of CPU power, preferably without having to kill them ?

I am just checking with resmon now. According to it wauserv is using 48% (96% of a CPU) and RpcEptMapper (RPC Endpoint Mapper) another 48%. Then according to the Task Manager my chess engine about a CPU as well. That should total to more than 2 CPUs!? CPU usage is at 100%. I got it down to 55% (the chess engine) even though RpcEptMapper is still allegedly using a CPU as well.

Thanks for your help.

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Windows Update is a known CPU hog. The best bet is to set the service to manual and turn off Windows Update automatic checking. You can check manually once a month.

cheers, Paul

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TTService is probably TorrentsTime Media Player. Do you need that running full-time?

Comodo cmdAgent is probably also a big factor: CPU 15% No Matter What (cmdAgent.exe)

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How can I prevent these processes from monopolizing an excessive amount of CPU power, preferably without having to kill them ?

There is something you can try; I’ve spent quite a bit of time on this problem myself. If you believe that this is an administrative/security/update task with some value, but you object to how much resources that task is consuming.

You start with Task Manager and fortunately, you’ve already found your way there. Identify the troublesome service(s), and again you’re ahead of the game on this matter.

Next, you must switch to the Processes tab in Task Manager. What follows cannot be done from Services or Applications, but this causes a problem. The tabs show different information, and how do they connect together, if at all? Well they do connect together.

From either Services or Applications, you can right click any items found there and select Switch To Processes. This not only switches tabs, it switches you in context with what you clicked on! It’s not perfect though; often TaskMan cannot make the connection between Services and Processes. However if it can do so it will.

Once on the Processes tab and with the relevant Process, right click that and choose Set Priority. Typically you will find it is set to Normal. You want to set it to Below Normal or Low. You will get a warning message that this could cause problems; there must be a reason for this warning but I’ve never yet had a problem doing so.

Just to be clear, I’m an IT analyst with many years of experience. Therefore I have quite a bit of knowledge concerning systems tuning and the issues it raises. I’ll give you some tips to keep you out of trouble:

1). There is a priority setting called Realtime. Don’t use this, ever! Windows isn’t an RTOS and monkeying around pretending it can emulate one isn’t on the path to success;
2). You can safely downgrade the runtime priorities of the following: Patch processes (think WUS, WSUS, WUB, etc.), updaters/installers, security scanning processes as long as they are batch scanners, and disk indexing services. You can safely set them as low a priority as you want; they will happily continue as low priority background tasks.

That’s the short & sweet version, and a very good start.

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Just to expand on my prior point.

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), and tools such as LANdesk Manager can also be used as patch delivery mechanisms, and are also good candidates for running at lowered priorities. They have other purposes as well of course, but nearly all those purposes fall within the category of “administrative and maintenance”.

Logically those are best implemented as low priority background tasks.

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Thanks for all your help. The problem has disappeared around the 25th of februari.I failed to record all measures I took. Here is what I know :- I have disabled TTService 24th of februari.- CmdAgent is still running but is behaving properly.- Windows update had giving problems, but I managed toinstall updates (I think) the 25th of februari.I am at a loss why all these processes are now behaving properly, or rather, why they misbehaved before.

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The high-CPU service you listed which puzzled me the most is Windows Time – this should use almost 0% of the CPU almost 100% of the time!

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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