How to Change Split Threshold for svchost.exe in Windows 10


Starting with Windows 10 Creators Update build 14942, service hosts (svchost.exe) are split into separate processes on PCs with 3.5 GB or more of RAM.

If your PC has 3.5+ GB of memory, you may notice an increased number of processes in Task Manager. While this change may look concerning at first glance, many will be excited to find out the motivation behind this change. As the number of preinstalled services grew, they began to get grouped into processes known as service hosts (svchost.exe’s) with Windows 2000. Note that the recommended RAM for PC’s for this release was 256 MB, while the minimum RAM was 64MB. Because of the dramatic increase in available memory over the years, the memory-saving advantage of service hosts has diminished. Accordingly, ungrouping services on memory-rich (3.5+ GB of RAM) PCs running Windows now offers us the opportunity to do the following:

1. Increase reliability: When one service in a service host fails, all services in the service host fail. In other words, the service host process is terminated resulting in termination of all running services within that process. Individual service failure actions are then run. As you may have noticed in Task Manager before, service hosts can contain a lot of services:


2. Increase transparency: Task Manager will now give you a better view into what is going on behind the scenes. You can now see how much CPU, Memory, Disk & Network individual services are consuming.

To see the name of the service, click on the left-most arrow such that the Display name drops down. Alternatively, right-click on the header and select ‘Command Line’ to add the Command Line column. Service names will be listed in the format ‘svchost.exe -k <svchost name> -s <service name>.’



3. Reduce servicing costs: Following reports of instability, service engineers, IT admins, and Microsoft engineers can rapidly pinpoint issues to the exact service and fix it.

4. Increase security: Process isolation and individual permission sets for services will increase security.

Note that critical system services (services whose recovery require system restarts), as well as a couple of select service hosts, will remain grouped.

If your PC has less than 3.5 GB of RAM, the classic service management model will be used. Services will be grouped like in previous versions of Windows.

If wanted, you can configure how Windows 10 splits up svchost.exe processes by changing the value of the SvcHostSplitThresholdInKB DWORD. This DWORD can be used to reduce the amount of svcshost.exe processes by increasing the threshold for when the service processes split.

The default and recommended behavior is having more svcshost.exe processes for the reasons above by leaving the SvcHostSplitThresholdInKB DWORD set to 380000.

This tutorial will show you how to change the split threshold for svchost.exe processes for all users in Windows 10.

You must be signed in as an administrator to change the SvcHostSplitThresholdInKB value.

Here's How:

1 Press the Win + R keys to open Run, type regedit into Run, and click/tap on OK to open Registry Editor.

1 Navigate to the key below in the left pane of Registry Editor. (see screenshot below)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

3 In the right pane of the Control key, double click/tap on the SvcHostSplitThresholdInKB DWORD to modify it. (see screenshot above)

4 Type the value from the table below based on the amount of RAM (memory) in KB your PC has or if you want to restore this back to default, and click/tap on OK. (see screenshot below)

Example formula for value:

8 GB = 8x1024 MB = 8x1024x1024 KB = 8388608 KB

RAM	Value
(default)	380000
4 GB	400000
6 GB	600000
8 GB	800000
12 GB	c00000
16 GB	1000000
24 GB	1800000
32 GB	2000000
64 GB	4000000

5 Close Registry Editor.

6 Restart the computer to apply.


That's it,
Shawn

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