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In my task manager, I have two entries for svchost.exe - one taking up 300MB of memory and the other 75MB.

Is that normal? If not, what should I do? What can the problem be? I don't remember seeing svchost.exe take up this much memory before.

OS: Windows Vista Home Premium SP1

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Having two entries for svchost.exe is not a problem. It is not uncommon to see several entries. For a bit of an explaination about the svchost.exe process, see the question What does the svchost.exe process do?.

As for the memory, 300MB does seem like a lot for a single instance. Have a look at the question svchost eating up memory and take a look at the process. If the process is hosting several services 300 MB might be reasonable, but if not the tool mentioned in the question, Process Explorer, can help you to determine which process is causing the problems.

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  • Just thought I'd mention here that certain malware changes its name to svchost.exe so that it cannot be identified easily, although that doesn't seem to be the case here. So if the User Name column beside the svchost.exe processes shows your user account name, and not a system account name, like SYSTEM/LOCAL SERVICE/NETWORK SERVICE, you can assume that it's something fishy.
    – Om Nom Nom
    Jun 23, 2010 at 20:33
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It's normal. svchost is basically the helper process for background Windows and other applications' services, so it can be running multiple tasks at the same time. And two copies of svchost is nothing; sometimes I have as many as 12. If the memory it's consuming is really bugging you, just restart your computer.

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Start up in safe mode, open Task manager and take a screenshot of running services. Start up normally, do the same, compare the two and start deleting services. I got rid of a 400 MB svchost.exe instance this very way.

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    Just killing processes without knowing what they are about is very risky business...
    – vonbrand
    Mar 5, 2013 at 1:45
  • well, right click on the service and goto the process, if its running @ 400 mb its either a bug or superfluous Mar 5, 2013 at 13:12
  • Or something that happens to need 400MiB. Unless you know which...
    – vonbrand
    Mar 5, 2013 at 13:37
  • Nothing in my little netbook world needs 400mb, if I dont know what the process and associated services are (rare) I google it and figure it out Mar 13, 2013 at 1:41

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