Re: Windows Update 100% CPU usage issue - a NEW twist on an old pr

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FYI - These PCs are not in a managed environment, these are all stand alone,
a mix of pro and home.
The issue appears not to be the download of SP3 itself. It happens at the
initial review of WU on the PC when WU is deciding what needs to be done
with/to the PC.
PCs are at SP2 when they get stuck, we have had a couple that sp3 install
"fixed" the issue but most are not getting that far, and some post SP3
install are still getting stuck in the same way.

it is random, in terms of who gets impacted but the impacted behavior is
consistant.

"Shenan Stanley" wrote:

Asker of stupid questions wrote:
Posting this hoping that someone in the WIndows Update team is
aware of and looking at this problem. I am 100% sure there is a
new issue with servicehost.exe process taking 100% CPU. The
bahavior is similar but actually worse than the problem of a year
or so ago that was patched. This is a NEW issue.

Since Tuesday a significant number of our customers (most are fully
up to date XP SP2, all flavors) are having issues with Windows
update taking 100% of CPU. On a single processor system the PC
goes to 100% CPU and never clears, we have left 2 systems over 5+
hours. On a hyper threaded or dual core CPU one thread runs the
one cpu to 100% but the remainder of the PC is stable. A
work-around is disabling auto-update.

We have had 2 Vista systems showing similar behavior but not to the
same scale as XP BTW so something is clearly in need of review.

It does not appear to be SP3 itself, nor does it appear to be a
latency/load issue on the WU servers. The PCs we have had this on
are all different OEMs, different ISPs, different sites etc. the
common thread is this one service that gets stuck and never clears,
unlike the similar issue a year ago that would eventually clear.

MSFT, please get on top of this before it snowballs.

One question - you stated, "most are fully up to date XP SP2, all flavors"
then state, "It does not appear to be SP3 itself" <- do you mean it does not
appear to be the attempted installation of SP3?

I have not seen this issue on the few hundred I have running SP2+ all
updates right before SP3 nor on the couple of hundred running SP3 - so...
There must be more to this.

--
Shenan Stanley
MS-MVP
--
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html



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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Windows Update 100% CPU usage issue - a NEW twist on an old pr
    ... Is KB927891 installed on all WinXP SP2 machines? ... The issue appears not to be the download of SP3 itself. ... PCs are at SP2 when they get stuck, we have had a couple that sp3 install ... new issue with servicehost.exe process taking 100% CPU. ...
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