svchost hogging RAM

Didn't find anything very revealing on this with google or searching around, so I'll just post it here.

I have seven instances of svchost.exe running. Three are systems, 42mb, 4mb, 3,5mb. Two are local services at 3mb and 3,5mb. What amazes me, though, is that the one of the two network services (the first runs at 3.6mb) hogs 100mb RAM. I'm not really "fuzzed" by the ram hogging as I've got plenty to splash with, but it's really strange, isn't it?

Might there be something wrong with it, perhaps something dodgy? I've got an up-to-date F-Secure and Blacklight, haven't found any rootkits or viruses. Maybe I should try Trend's HijackThis they're so much talking about?

Any hints?

 

I dont think there is anything wrong. try this:

To view the list of services that are running in Svchost:
1. Click Start on the Windows taskbar, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type CMD, and then press ENTER.
3. Type Tasklist /SVC, and then press ENTER.
Tasklist displays a list of active processes. The /SVC switch shows the list of active services in each process. For more information about a process, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
Tasklist /FI "PID eq processID" (with the quotation marks)

 

Doesn't show anything very interesting there. It just keeps growing, though, the svchost.

 

Save all your work and try ending the process. Are you doing any large downloads at the moment?

 

Nope, non at all. Opera is hogging 100 MB:s of RAM too, could be a software issue then. Maybe I'll switch to firefox to see it out.

Shutting it down manually would result in a system shutdown, windows doesn't like dabbling with the svchosts. I did try it, though, it's about to go down.

 

Having now rebooted the rig, it starts up at around 4,5MBs, and Opera starts up at around 50MBs. So I'm tempted to believe it's some sort of a memory leak in the browser that causes the strange fillup.

 

I use Opera (9.20) too and it uses 18MB right now displaying this page and nothing else. The svchost (network service) are using 5.5 and 3.9MB. Strange that it is using so much for you.

 

Yeah, I just updated my Opera. It's still 50Mb:s, but then again I have lots of tabs with some SQL databases open so it might cause more usage. The network service is currently at 5MBs, I'll just keep following if it starts expanding itself.

 

They both still keep expanding. At 88mb for Opera and 6,5mb for the specific instance of svchost now.

 

Memory expansion for Opera and any tabbed browser, really, is normal. The more tabs you open, the more the browser needs to cache. Opera uses as much or less memory than IE if viewing single webpages and far less than Firefox. Firefox has severe memory hogging issues due to the way it caches previously viewed webpages in it's Backcache. Opera is by far better in terms memory consumption than Firefox.

It is normal for svchosts to consume anywhere from 3MB to 40MB. However, it shouldn't take up more than 50MB. Whatever service that particular svchost is launching is memory leaking. Most common ones are caused by bad driver services (Intel has way too many services IMHO). wave's advice should have provided you the service that the particularly large svchost is launching. Stop that service and see if your memory usages increases to such a high degree again.