High CPU usage: (peaks)

xyz · 25 May 2016

I first posted in another person’s thread, but have been advised to post my own, so here goes with my problem.

High CPU usage: (peaks).

I only notice it early mornings after switching computer on for the day, because I listen to music over Jango Radio then, and the sound gets totally distorted - I haven’t really noticed it at other times (but?).

Through Task Manager I saw that some background use was peaking right up into the 90+ %, but couldn’t find out what.

Today I got a bit of help after downloading Sysinternals Process Explorer

I won’t pretend I understand anything of this software – way above and far out of my league – but it does have a graph part that shows the peaks and tells you what, so:

Main culprit: taskhostw.exe (peaking in CPU at as much as 97/98 %)
in Process Explorer there usually follows some number after (maybe designating what is using it?), like: taskhostw.exe9596 or 4640/12112/10024/8480/9160/9068/10116

at times it is a group of culprits one after the other (briefly), like:
taskhostw.exe (97%)/interrupts (94%)/procexp64.exe (%? But high)/ skypehost.exe1592 or 9236 (63,90% or 84%)/ svchost.exe9884/1032/8480

skypehost.exe : On a website I read about skypehost.exe, that in W10, the app in Store causes Background peaking, while the Desktop version of Skype does not. I use the desktop version. But I have (hopefully) now uninstalled the Store version (there were two versions installed on my computer), and hope this is one problem less?

That leaves:

taskhostw.exe (main offender)
interrupts
procexp64.exe
svchost.exe (1032/8480)
WmiPrvSE.exe (12488)
Tiworker.exe(11880)

Afternoon: I have now been listening to music over Jango Radio for the last 45 minutes or more without any sound distortion.

This would/might suggest that the high peaks in the morning are connected to updates (and such like) searches, or?

This is all I can say on the subject – totally freaked out with such stuff – way out of my capabilities.

(I also downloaded Securities Task Manager and ran that, but could not see anything that might be causing a problem.)

(W10/64 Lenovo Intel Core i3-3220, 3.30 GHz, 8GB, AMD HD7500)

dalchina · 27 May 2016

Hello, I'll comment briefly on taskhostw.exe - and start by saying there's nothing easy or simple to say that I can find! Because it's little known, internet references often assume the person means taskhost.exe.

First, this exists only in the WinSXS folder (Windows Side by Side Component store).
Ref.
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-windows-7-8
(Note the cleanup command).

As such it's a bit of a puzzle to me as to why it would be executing.

Second, it's a little-known process, relatively new:

Okay, lets discuss how to get rid of these processes... - Page 2 - Windows 10 - MSFN
I just learned more about taskhostw.exe today. It is the new task host process (surprise!) for several user-mode tasks that used to run inside of separate taskeng.exe processes under Windows 7 and 8. I love it when Microsoft innovates like this. Here, they were attempting to reduce the number of processes running in the background by consolidating two or three taskeng.exe processes into a single taskhostw.exe process.
Process Explorer and Process Hacker both don't know how to enumerate the tasks it's hosting, so I found out the following by trial and error (watching its CPU usage while I started and stopped running tasks helped point me in the right direction). On my computer, it is hosting the following tasks:

Multimedia\SystemSoundsService (redirected emulator for the PC Beep function; never missed it being off, although I do miss the physical PC speaker on PCs, and the old beep.sys that would make the PC speaker on existing PCs still function. Was very useful for alarms when the speakers were off, headphones plugged in, or the volume muted).
TextServicesFramework\MsCtfMonitor (not sure that it does anything on a single-language system; I've never missed it being off).
Wininet\CacheTask (never missed it being off; but I use Firefox for my web browsing and it uses its own web and DNS cache mechanisms).

If you stop all those tasks, taskhostw.exe will exit. Now I'm not sure what ubpm.dll has to do with taskhostw.exe anymore, except that we know that it has its name and that mysterious GUID embedded inside.

===================
TiWorker is the trustedinstaller which installs updates and enables Windows features.
So that suggests some sort of update is going on.
You might like to look at your windows update history and see if an update is being repeated or failing.

xyz · 27 May 2016

Thanks a lot dalchina, really appreciate your time and help,

Checked out the Links you gave – a bit too technical for me.

But I did do the disk cleanup

As far as I can tell the problem seems to only happen for a period after starting computer for the day, so I guess I will just have to wait until whatever goes on during that time to finish – or just put up with the horrible (but brief) sound interruptions for as long as it takes.

I will keep my eye open for:

Multimedia\SystemSoundsService

TextServicesFramework\MsCtfMonitor

Wininet\CacheTask

And if I see them running during this time will shut them down and sees if this helps.

(I do wonder if the Multimedia\SystemSoundsService has anything to do with my listening to the Online Jango radio??)

Once again, my thanks, will update if anything good happens