Services.exe using high memory but little CPU

I checked task manager before I went to sleep for the night for some unknown reason, and lo and behold I see my memory usage at 69%. I go and check and see that a process called "services and controller app" aka services.exe is casually using up 7000+ mb of my 16gb of RAM in my laptop. I ended the process tree when I looked into the "details" tab of Task manager, and then my laptop BSOD. On reboot, it seems to be working fine. I've seen other people with the same issue and it may be something with the Event Log service? I can't seem to find it in services.msc and don't know how to disable it? What caused it, and how can I prevent it from happening again? Could this have damaged my laptop?

Ztruker said:

I'd say you caused it by killing a system service. It was obviously doing something that didn't like being interrupted.
Instead of killing it, you need to look deeper to understand what it is doing. There are many scheduled tasks that occur during off hours for maintenance, like weekly defrag, Defender scans. As long as this is not an all the time thing I'd leave it alone. Check it again in the morning.


Could have but since your system is running okay, probably not.

I know that killing the "services.exe" process tree caused the BSOD, the error it gave me stated "Critical process die" or something around the lines of that. It hasn't happened again yet, so it might have been a 3rd party program.

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bro67 said:

Use SysInternals Process Explorer to look at the sub-process of Services.exe, since it can be anything from Malware to a poorly written process from a third party program you have installed.

I'll look into this, thanks.

bro67 said:

Use SysInternals Process Explorer to look at the sub-process of Services.exe, since it can be anything from Malware to a poorly written process from a third party program you have installed.

Wow... you guys are good. This is exactly what I was going to suggest before I saw it already posted. This will allow you to pinpoint exactly which service is causing what sounds like a memory leak.
Is your system completely up-to-date? Have you checked to see if there were any updates that continued to fail on attempting to install? This is perhaps secondary to finding out specifically what service is causing the absurd amount of memory usage, but may be a potential next step once you find this out.

Just as an extra bit of uhh... 'support' for you... if you would like a way to clear your Event Viewer logs, CCleaner is supposed to clean that particular log file as part of its 'free up space' function, but personally, I run a batch file as administrator. I'll leave the code below if anyone would like to copy/paste into notepad and save as a .bat file :)

Code:

@echo off
FOR /F "tokens=1,2*" %%V IN ('bcdedit') DO SET adminTest=%%V
IF (%adminTest%)==(Access) goto noAdmin
for /F "tokens=*" %%G in ('wevtutil.exe el') DO (call :do_clear "%%G")
echo.
echo Event Logs have been cleared! ^<press any key^>
goto theEnd
:do_clear
echo clearing %1
wevtutil.exe cl %1
goto :eof
:noAdmin
echo You must run this script as an Administrator!
echo ^<Press Any Key^>
:theEnd
pause>NUL

​REMEMBER - THIS MUST BE RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR IN ORDER TO WORK