Windows Update high CPU usage

[Dean Roddey]

I was hit by this issue this morning, probably something to do with the batch of updates that went in yesterday, and this was the first update scan after that. Some people get bitten by it. I think in this case it was related to something it's doing to try to automatically figure out if Windows 10 will run and whether to offer you the upgrade. It goes off into la-la land and eats up a CPU for basically forever.

Stopping the Windows Update service makes it immediately go away, so clearly that's the culprit.

I opted out of getting Microsoft software, since some folks had seen that as an issue. I installed a couple patches supposedly related to this issue but that didn't help. I set a registry flag to force it not to accept any OS version upgrades via Update, and that doesn't appear to have helped.

It's stupidly annoying. It happened to my old Vista machine a couple weeks ago, and I've not figured out how to stop it there yet because I didn't much care and just disabled updates.

I guess I should go back and remove those patches from yesterday since I'd never seen it on this machine before then.

[Dean Roddey]

OK, well as soon as I hit post, it stopped. I think that my previous changes caused it to go all the way back to the beginning of time and scan for all changes. But at least the CPU stopped and it showed new updates to install. Oh well, all's well that ends well I guess.

Definitely on the Vista machine it never stopped. I let it run all day and it kept one CPU exactly locked all day, which is a pretty clear sign of a runaway loop.

And it was showing no sign of stopping before I made those changes, so presumably that did fix it. I guess I should figure out if it was the Windows 10 upgrade probing or the MS software being included in the updates.

[Dean Roddey]

I guess I got it. It ran really hard for about 5 minutes after restarting it again after the above mentioned updates, but then dropped back down again to normal.

[znelbok]

Im seeing higher than normal (up to 100%) CPU usage on my server as well. Not sure what the trigger was, but it only gets updates as well. I doubt mine is from a W10 update issue as its W2k8.

I just don't have time to investigate at all unfortunately.

[Dean Roddey]

It's pretty easy to find out what it is, or narrow it down:

1. Bring up the task list
2. Show processes for all users
3. Sort by CPU

See what's at the top of the list. If it's a single named process, then that's the guy and you can look into what that program is and what you might do about it.

If its svchost.exe, then that's a host for services and it will have multiples running within it. Right click on it and select 'go to services'. It will take you to the services list and all of the services running within it will be selected.

You can take a look at those services and see if there's anything in there that might be a candidate. For most of them, the ones that aren't core system services, you can just temporarily pause them and see if the CPU issues goes away. If so, that's the guy and you can look into possible fixes.

[znelbok]

Thanks - will check on the weekend