How to fix High CPU Usage by taskhost.exe in Windows 10

How to fix High CPU Usage by Service Host  in Windows 10

Windows 8.1 had issues with the Service Host consuming High CPU usage if there was a user account with a certain type of username. This problem and resolution are mentioned in this article. For Windows 10, there are few number of users who are also facing similar issues with CPU usage. In this post, we are going to talk about How to fix High CPU Usage by taskhost.exe in Windows 10.

A lot of users have reported about High CPU usage with taskhost.exe. The good news is that it is not a virus and it will not cause any real harm other than slowing down the system. In the case of taskhost.exe, it is used to host all DLL-based services that are running in Windows. The process is generic and is used to load other entities in it.  Different DLL’s might cause multiple instances of taskhost.exe to run in the system. If there are faulty DLL’s loaded into taskhost.exe, this might cause high memory and CPU bottleneck. Killing the process from process explorer might kill the DLL it is hosting and that might close some important programs.

Here are some of the steps that you can follow to resolve High CPU usage with taskhost.exe

• Do not create any user account that contains the string “User” on the computer (Applicable to Windows 8.1)
• Go to Scheduled Tasks and check if you are running any Windows Reliability Analysis Task. Stop the job and check for improvements.
• In order to debug the problem, you need to use the Windows performance Toolkit to create a trace file and record the behavior.
• From the process explorer, find out each thread and see if anyone has unusual stats displayed and suspend the process. This might stop some background app or services.
• Go to the Action Centre>Select Maintenance>Select View reliability history, Select>view all problem reports>Select clear “All problem reports” button.
• In order to ensure that no 3rd Party Application is consuming the CPU resources, boot to Safe Mode and check using process explorer.
• Use “Resource Monitor” to monitor your system CPU, Memory, Disk Usage in Real time. Kill any unwanted process if necessary.

I hope this is helpful. For any feedback, feel free to use the comments section.