svchost hogging ram.

[Zaney2522]

I recently installed a new version of windows to my computer, (windows 7 home premium 64 bit) and I've been noticing that almost 2 gigs of ram were being sucked away at startup. I looked into this issue and found out that most of my ram was being used up by a process called svchost.exe.
I shut off automatic windows updates and that manged to free up some ram, but I'm still having an entire gig being used at startup and even idle.

Can anybody help?

 

[Dunlop0078]

svchost is a legit windows process I have 11 of them running. I use about 1.0-1.3gb at idle that is perfectly normal.

 

[Poprin]

Yes. That's totally standard behaviour.

What operating system have you upgraded from?

RAM being used is a good thing, not a bad thing. How much RAM do you currently have?

 

[Poprin]

svchost is a legit windows process I have 11 of them running. I use about 1.0-1.3gb at idle that is perfectly normal.

totes correct +1

 

[Zaney2522]

svchost is a legit windows process I have 11 of them running. I use about 1.0-1.3gb at idle that is perfectly normal.

I know it's legit, but having it use up a whole gig of my 4 total gigs of ram isnt acceptable.

 

[Zaney2522]

Yes. That's totally standard behaviour.

What operating system have you upgraded from?

RAM being used is a good thing, not a bad thing. How much RAM do you currently have?

I have actually been switching my OS around quite a lot in the last few months due to other technical issues, but I had an inactivated version of windows 7 Ultimate before.

I know, but having a whole gig being sucked up on idle just isnt right... I have 4GBs of DDR3.

 

[Dunlop0078]

svchost is a legit windows process I have 11 of them running. I use about 1.0-1.3gb at idle that is perfectly normal.

I know it's legit, but having it use up a whole gig of my 4 total gigs of ram isnt acceptable.

Well thats just the way it is sorry to say. Windows 7 64bit requires you to have at least 2gb of system ram for a reason.

 

[Poprin]

I know it's legit, but having it use up a whole gig of my 4 total gigs of ram isnt acceptable.

You are looking at it totally the wrong way. If you have 4gb of RAM... why do you want as much of it doing nothing as possible? How does that help the performance of the machine? It' not like a platter hard drive, RAM stands for Random Access Memory therefore regardless of how full it is the access performance is exactly the same. You want Windows to load as much into RAM as it can so it reduces hard disk access.

 

[Zaney2522]

I know it's legit, but having it use up a whole gig of my 4 total gigs of ram isnt acceptable.

You are looking at it totally the wrong way. If you have 4gb of RAM... why do you want as much of it doing nothing as possible? How does that help the performance of the machine? It' not like a platter hard drive, RAM stands for Random Access Memory therefore regardless of how full it is the access performance is exactly the same. You want Windows to load as much into RAM as it can so it reduces hard disk access.

Interesting. I didnt know this. I wanted to stop the program from using so much ram because when I play even simple games like CS:GO, it seems to fill up to 3.5 gigs, leaving hardly no room for anything else.

 

[Dunlop0078]

I know it's legit, but having it use up a whole gig of my 4 total gigs of ram isnt acceptable.

You are looking at it totally the wrong way. If you have 4gb of RAM... why do you want as much of it doing nothing as possible? How does that help the performance of the machine? It' not like a platter hard drive, RAM stands for Random Access Memory therefore regardless of how full it is the access performance is exactly the same. You want Windows to load as much into RAM as it can so it reduces hard disk access.

Interesting. I didnt know this. I wanted to stop the program from using so much ram because when I play even simple games like CS:GO, it seems to fill up to 3.5 gigs, leaving hardly no room for anything else.

Well as long as you dont exceed 4gb of ram in use your system will perform just fine. 4gb is pushing it for gaming nowadays as you can see, you may want to look into upgrading to 8gb at some point especially if you plan to play games more demanding than CS GO.

 

[Zaney2522]

I know it's legit, but having it use up a whole gig of my 4 total gigs of ram isnt acceptable.

You are looking at it totally the wrong way. If you have 4gb of RAM... why do you want as much of it doing nothing as possible? How does that help the performance of the machine? It' not like a platter hard drive, RAM stands for Random Access Memory therefore regardless of how full it is the access performance is exactly the same. You want Windows to load as much into RAM as it can so it reduces hard disk access.

Interesting. I didnt know this. I wanted to stop the program from using so much ram because when I play even simple games like CS:GO, it seems to fill up to 3.5 gigs, leaving hardly no room for anything else.

Well as long as you dont exceed 4gb of ram in use your system will perform just fine. 4gb is pushing it for gaming nowadays as you can see, you may want to look into upgrading to 8gb at some point especially if you plan to play games more demanding than CS GO.

Okay. Thank you.

Lol of course I do. I only play csgo and stuff cuz my graphics card is a piece of dirt.

 

[Poprin]

Interesting. I didnt know this. I wanted to stop the program from using so much ram because when I play even simple games like CS:GO, it seems to fill up to 3.5 gigs, leaving hardly no room for anything else.

Yes but that's ok because that's exactly what Windows is supposed to do. You have 4gb available so it's going to use it, if you need more RAM for something else then Windows will switch out of RAM what it's not using and load in what it needs on the fly. RAM works in timings down to the nanosecond so by the time you've opened task manager and your eyes have processed the information it's already changed it!

Don't be concerned it's normal behaviour, the time when not enough RAM is an issue is when you notice RAM being constantly 95% + full and significant disk activity when running a program or switching between programs resulting in a slow down of performance. If you check the machine is not running a disk intensive process at the time (like a virus scan) then this is usually the machine having to use the swap file (page file) and swapping basically information it needs out of RAM because it needs to put something else in there. But 4gb of RAM is usually enough for Windows 7 do handle standard office applications, browsing and light gaming. It depends on your machine usage.

 

[Zaney2522]

Interesting. I didnt know this. I wanted to stop the program from using so much ram because when I play even simple games like CS:GO, it seems to fill up to 3.5 gigs, leaving hardly no room for anything else.

Yes but that's ok because that's exactly what Windows is supposed to do. You have 4gb available so it's going to use it, if you need more RAM for something else then Windows will switch out of RAM what it's not using and load in what it needs on the fly. RAM works in timings down to the nanosecond so by the time you've opened task manager and your eyes have processed the information it's already changed it!

Don't be concerned it's normal behaviour, the time when not enough RAM is an issue is when you notice RAM being constantly 95% + full and significant disk activity when running a program or switching between programs resulting in a slow down of performance. If you check the machine is not running a disk intensive process at the time (like a virus scan) then this is usually the machine having to use the swap file (page file) and swapping basically information it needs out of RAM because it needs to put something else in there. But 4gb of RAM is usually enough for Windows 7 do handle standard office applications, browsing and light gaming. It depends on your machine usage.

Thank you! this helped a lot. 😉 I'm probably just gonna upgrade my ram.

 

[aford10]

Open the task manager and find the svchost that is taking up the memory. Right click on it and view the services it controls. Check to see if one of them is the windows update service. If yes, run windows updates, and it will calm that service down, and stop using up your RAM. I've seen this a lot lately.

 

[Zaney2522]

Open the task manager and find the svchost that is taking up the memory. Right click on it and view the services it controls. Check to see if one of them is the windows update service. If yes, run windows updates, and it will calm that service down, and stop using up your RAM. I've seen this a lot lately.

LOL. Yea, I figured this out. Tonight I'm going to leave my pc on to do some updates, but until then I have windows updates off.

 

[aford10]

Get them caught up to date, and then you can handle them manually or automatic.