svchost/wuauclt.exe 100% cpu usage

[CHR1S]

On one PC only we are getting 100% CPU usage when wuauclt.exe runs at start up and during its detection cycle. Once the cycle has finished its all back to normal but this can take 10 minutes or more.

I've googled it etc and found no real explanation or solution, anyone ever encountered it before?

 

Thanks

 

Chris

[Geoff]

I've found this happen when it's checking Office. Deselecting Office in the products section of the WSUS server seems to make the problem go away.

[CHR1S]

Kind of defeats the object of WSUS tho

[Geoff]

What happens if you manually take the machine to the windows/office update sites and update it manually?

[Slartibartfast]

Does the machine have access to the original Office installation source?

 

If it is on a network share, make sure that the relevant groups have read access.

[CHR1S]

Yeh, its a teachers machine with limited restrictions and its a managed software msi.

 

Havent taken it to the website yet... will try it but what diffrence will it make?

[Geoff]

It might be getting 'stuck' on an update. If you go to the website logged in as admin you should be able to install all the updates it needs regardless of what state it's in.

[CHR1S]

Its a possibility, ill give it at try and let you know.

 

Thanks

[jclientelle]

Well, I have not found out how to get rid of it, but if you go into task manager and set wuauclt.exe priority to low system runs faster. Joe

[thom]

I have had a similar problem but I can't find the full solution.

This should remove any corrupted updates

Stop the WUAU Service

Delete "c:\windows\softwaredistribution" folder

Start the WUAU service

I'll keep a look out for that fix

[DMcCoy]

If the issue is just CPU usage being high, as I understand it, there is no fix. It is by design, the only hotfixes affect crashing and extremely long scan times.

 

Windows update takes a few minutes without office and slows the machine, but it is still usable.

 

Windows update with office will invoke the msi installer process to scan for the office patches, consuming all cpu for extended periods of time, this is unusable.

 

Two options

 

1) Wait

2) Turn off office updates on wsus.

 

I went for 2.

[browolf]

this happened on most of our admin machines since last thursday :-S

[Michael]

This WSUS Faq might help.

[Michael]

Thinking about it, it is a coincidence Geoff said it's to do with Office. There were some Excel updates released this month (March).

 

If it's happening on just one machine, I would leave Office enabled in WSUS and manually run Microsoft Update on the one workstation.

[ajbritton]

For what it's worth, my home laptop has been fine for a couple of years until I put Office 2003 on it a few days ago. Now suddenly I'm hit with the WUAUCLT 100% bug. Very brief analysis of WindowsUpdate.log certainly reveals activity relating to Office components. Coincidence? Hmmmm.....

[Michael]

I do wonder if it's down to the Office update sizes themselves. For example, there's one update to Excel 2007 this month that's 11MB. Bit of a joke if you ask me!

[ajbritton]

I googled for WUAUCLT 100% CPU and turned up a few possible fixes but have not had time to investigate yet. My laptop has been OK since the one terrible boot up.

[mullet_man]

I thought this was a know problem, try this patch

 

http://blogs.technet.com/wsus/archive/2007/05/15/srvhost-msi-issue-follow-up.aspx

[browolf]

there's not a huge amount I can do as its a 3rd party managed admin network. supposedly some other schools in lancashire have had the same problem and have been fixed but im not sure how.Im a bit reluctant to approve any updates to our own academic machines after this and without knowing what the best fix is.

[ajbritton]

The problem returned to my laptop. I disabled the AutoUpdate service but found that I could no longer do manual Windows Updates!

 

I've since upgraded RAM to 2Gb and re-enabled AutoUpdate. The problems have not recurred. I speculate therefore that the WindowsUpdate service was taking up a lot of RAM and causing lots of paging to take place.

[link470]

I'm frantically working on images for each of the labs as school gets in in TWO weeks, and I'm really pressured. Everything is going great, except for all of the sudden, EACH of my images [i have 7 machines out on a table each a sample of a different lab in the school] and working on them.

 

I start by installing my latest slipstreamed XP with SP3 disc, and then installing drivers, and then Office 2003 Professional and Office OneNote 2007 [since the teachers use Wacom Cintiq tablet displays and Office OneNote 2007 has better handwriting recognition]. Then I go to Windows Update, download all updates, go again, and again, etc. you know the drill, until all the fixes etc. for Office Updates have been updated fro Microsoft Update, and eventually shows 0 updates left.

 

Also install all optional updates, including Windows Search 4.0 [a possible culprit? not sure].

 

So here I am. All machines are now showing 100% CPU utilization on SvcHost.exe. 10 minutes after the machine has booted up, it goes away and returns to normal and the machine is usable again.

 

Some machine hardware samples:

-Dell GX260 // Pentium 4 2GHz // 512MB PC2100 RAM // 40GB HD

-Dell GX240 // Pentium 4 1.8GHz // 512MB PC133 RAM // 40GB HD

-Compaq Evo D5S // Pentium 4 1.7GHz // 512MB PC133 RAM // 40GB HD

 

If I run Windows Update [as I always do from the website on each machine, I don't run a WSUS server], the CPU utilization goes right back up, and after the updates finish and I've closed Internet Explorer, it remains at 100% until 5 minutes or so pass. Then it settles down again. I thought by now that Microsoft would have fixed this issue.

 

So I check the Process ID, it's the SVCHOST thats carrying the list of like, 15 processes, as opposed to the other SVCHOST processes that are only running 1. Hope this helps, I'd love to get this fixed, as the idea is to have students NOT wait 10 minutes for login, that was the whole reason I started this huge imaging and hardware upgrade deal.

 

Thanks guys.

[tjb]

@ Link470 - We had the same issue last year and used this fix which we had to get directly from Microsoft under our Gold Partner status on all of our workstations. Try it on one PC and see if it fixes the problem. I eventually added it to our image when we next rolled it out. Good luck!

 

Ooops the file is 6MB so I can't upload! PM me your email address and I'll email it to you

 

UPDATED: The file is called windowsupdateagent30-x86.exe which you can Google and get a link directly from Microsoft to download it.

Edited August 22, 2008 by tjb
Updated

[link470]

Thank you very much for your reply tjb! Much appreciated. I'll download that file and save it if I need it. For some reason, the machines stopped doing their CPU 100% deal for SVCHOST...at least for the past few hours they have. I've been watching them closely. I did the next step in my builds, adding the sample machine to our domain, and it stopped. Of course, my domain rules the machine to have automatic updates turned off, but I'm logged in as local administrator still at the moment and have yet to log in as a domain account. We'll see what happens next! Thanks again!

[srochford]

If you follow back through this thread then you'll see that this was a known problem which MS fixed quite a while ago - as @tjb says, the fix is a change to the windows update software itself but that should just come down automatically.

 

You mention desktop search; unless your machines are pretty powerful then I would definitely not include this - it really can slug performance (to be fair to MS, most search software can slug performance on a low spec machine; it's a big job to index a complete hard drive!). It's also not terribly useful unless your users save files on the local drive.

[cookie_monster]

I've found that Office updates cause any machine under 2GHz to slow down when you compare them to most windows patches they're monsters, when the client actually gets around to applying the updates they crunch away for ages.

 

Excluding C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution in the AV software sometimes helps on older clients.