svchost.exe [RpcSs] High CPU & memory usage

Hi guys.

I left my laptop on for the night because I was downloading something [anime, if you really want to know]. Now, I noticed my CPU temps higher than normal [47~60C -- my CPU usually runs at 40~45C when idle. Also, I use NHC to see my temps]. When I opened up Task Manager, here's what I see causes the problem:

[ Ignore the highlighted process, just look at the process svchost.exe taking up 34% CPU usage and 112MB of memory -- I arranged it by CPU usage]

And when I look it up at Process Explorer:

RPC?! I thought that was soooo 5 years ago. My memories of the Blaster worm are still fresh.

I have to do a full reboot to get rid of the problem.

I noticed this only usually happens when I leave my laptop on for a long period of time [usually when I download]. But it doesn't happen on my desktop, which I also sometimes leave turned on overnight to download. So I was wondering if there's a solution to this?

Thanks!

 

RPC is nothing to do with viruses or worms. It's a core part of Windows.
Anyway, why have you highlighted wmiprvse.exe in Process Explorer, when it's the svchost below it that actually takes the 33% CPU time? What's that one running, that'd be a lot more relevant

Anyway, http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/rpcss/

 

In Task Manager, go to View > Select Columns... and tell it to include the PID (process id) column. Check the PID of the svchost.exe process that's eating the cpu and ram. Then go to the Services tab and see which services are running under that PID. There are probably a few... you can click the PID column to sort by PID, which should make it easier to find them. It's one of those services.

You can try disabling the services with that PID one by one to see if the problem goes away. You may want to look up the service on blackviper.com to be sure you're not disabling anything too critical.

As Jalf mentioned, I wouldn't worry too much about the wmiprvse.exe process. It looks like it was launched by svchost.exe (if I'm understanding the Process Explorer display correctly), but it doesn't look like that process is really the problem... right?

 

Okay, I'm getting this too (just found this thread via Google). The longer I leave my laptop on, the worse the CPU usage/RAM eating gets. The process is RPCSS (Remote Procedure Call service). Disabling the service makes Windows cranky (pops up an error message and tells me I have 1 minute until it auto-restarts).

Some observations that might help:
I found that the process just makes new threads over and over again, and nothing else. It seems to be caught in an infinite loop (which would explain the steadily increasing RAM usage as the day goes on). See the screenshot:
- all the CPU usage is coming from "kernel32.dll!CreateThread+0x22"

That, combined with this knowledge base article on RPCSS:

I came across one other thread with this problem, who also a laptop. So it seems to have something to do with network connections and laptops...

I tried uninstalling my wireless drivers, but the issue remained. This is frustrating.

Edit:

SOLVED IT!
Found this thread. Nvidia Display Driver Service is the culprit. Stop it (and disable it to keep it from coming back) and CPU/RAM usage drops down to normal. Hooray!

 

Hmmm... lots of us use network connections and laptops though, and I've never seen this....

Also, that Knowledge Base article is for Windows 2000, and it applies to systems using DCOM, which Google tells me is a system for applications distributed among computers. So... I don't know.

 

I've posted some detailed instructions (with screenshots) on my blog:

http://www.netjeff.com/wp/?p=394