Question What is "COM Surrogate" and why does it keep eating up my resources?

[DavidVioMC]

For a while I have been noticing that a process called COM Surrogate will eat up my resources like theres no tomorrow and I have to end it to free up my resources, sometimes it's so bad that I can tell when my PC is getting slow. I have no idea what it does since ending it doesn't seem to do anything except free up resources, sometimes it will use 25GB of RAM and 75% of CPU for no reason. Not sure what it does and how I can prevent this from happening, any thoughts? My PC specs are in my signature and I'm running Windows 10 Pro.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Where are you obtaining this information from? Resource monitor? Because that’s where you should be looking to see what’s eating resources

 

[NotWD]

Information on the legitimate Windows COM Surrogate: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090212-00/?p=19173

TL;DR: COM Surrogate is a sacrificial process used by other processes to run tasks outside of their own executables. The example in the article is browsing to a thumbnail-enabled folder in Explorerfiring one off to generate the thumbnails.

 

[DavidVioMC]

Where are you obtaining this information from? Resource monitor? Because that’s where you should be looking to see what’s eating resources

I used Task Manager to verify the useage.

Information on the legitimate Windows COM Surrogate: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090212-00/?p=19173

TL;DR: COM Surrogate is a sacrificial process used by other processes to run tasks outside of their own executables. The example in the article is browsing to a thumbnail-enabled folder in Explorerfiring one off to generate the thumbnails.

How would I be able to prevent this? It's defintely not a virus since the PC has clean Windows install with just drivers and Steam. I haven't even installed Google Chrome since I don't use it for anything else than gaming, Razer Stealth is my daily driver.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Maybe it’s part of steam

turn off thumbnails