2013-07-08

Solved: svchost.exe high CPU and memory

A few days ago one of the svchost.exe processes on my machine (Win7 64) started exhibiting this annoying behavior: it will start with about 30 to 40 megabytes of memory, which stays roughly constant for a while, but then later it begins bloating, slowly but surely, possibly at a slightly exponential rate, until a few hours later it is taking up so many gigabytes that I cannot work on my computer anymore. So, I have to stop what I am doing, save everything, and restart the computer, only to have to go through the same ordeal a few hours later.

On at least two occasions I have witnessed this happening along with unreasonably high CPU utilization, up to a full CPU core.

Obviously, this started happening after I installed or tweaked something, but I did not notice the precise point in time that it started happening, and my machine is a busy machine, so I had no suspects to name.

I looked around the interwebz for a solution, but to no avail.  People give some good troubleshooting hints, but nobody seems to have an actual solution.

The svchost.exe process which causes the problem contains the following services:


2013-07-07

A monstrous Visual Studio 2010 intellisense bug

I had this happening on my development machine, (I use C# on VS2010) so I went over to The Code Project and asked if anyone else could reproduce it, and sure enough, it has been confirmed.
Steps to reproduce:

Create a new project, make it a C# console application, use all default settings. Open the generated Program.cs file and replace its contents with the following:

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    public class ParameterAttribute: System.Attribute
    {
    }

    class Program
    {
        [Parameter( name:"foo" )]
        int Field1;

        static void Main( string[] args )
        {
        }
    }
}



I know, there is an error in the code; please bear with me: