Question

I'm running Windows 7. It seems that svchost is eating up a lot of memory.

The user name for the particular svchost instance is "Network Service". The description is "Hose Process for Windows Services".

Sometimes it eats up 50% of the CPU usage. Other times, it's just under 5%. I can't figure out when it's 50% and when it's not. But it fluctuates often -- even when I've just booted up and no programs were started.

Edit: When I go to the services for that svchost instance, I get the following:

How do I diagnose this?

Answer 1

SVC Host is made up of many services running on your machine. I recommend you either right click on it and choose "View Services" to see what is actually causing it (after choosing show processes from all users).

You can also use Microsoft / Sysinternals Process Explorer which should show you in more detail what is happening.

(Hovering mouse over the svchost.exe process in Process Explorer)