My PC was behaving sluggishly the other day. I tried to be patient, but had to fire up the task manager when I could bear it no longer. That’s when I noticed great gobs of my swap file allocated to “SVCHOST.EXE”:

The problem is, SVCHOST is a catch all windows service container. Meaning, many windows services run under the same instance of SVCHOST. How was I going to figure out which services might be the culprit?

Enter the tasklist command.

Tasklist displays info about running tasks, including SVCHOST.

Simply running tasklist at the command prompt displays a laundry list of all running processes. This wasn’t going to do it, so I ran it with the “/?” switch to try and find how to narrow the info…

/SVC Displays services hosted in each process.
/FI filter Displays a set of tasks that match a given criteria specified by the filter.

Looks good so far, now I need to know what filter to apply:

Filters:
    Filter Name     Valid Operators           Valid Value(s)
    -----------     ---------------           --------------------------
    IMAGENAME       eq, ne                    Image name

OK, this gives us:

“C:\>tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME EQ SCVHOST.EXE”

But it seems the filter is case sensitive, because when I run that command, I get this:

INFO: No tasks are running which match the specified criteria.

So, switching to lower case gives me what I want:

“C:\>tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME EQ svchost.exe”

Image Name     PID        Services
=========== =====  =======================
svchost.exe     744        DcomLaunch
svchost.exe     844        RpcSs
svchost.exe     888        AeLookupSvc, AppMgmt,
                                    AudioSrv, BITS, Browser,
                                    CryptSvc, dmserver,
                                    EventSystem,lanmanserver,
                                    lanmanworkstation, Netman,
                                    Nla, RasMan, Schedule,
                                    seclogon, SENS,ShellHWDetection,
                                    Themes, winmgmt, wuauserv
svchost.exe     928         Dhcp, Dnscache
svchost.exe     976         LmHosts, W32Time
svchost.exe     1772       Net Driver HPZ12
svchost.exe     1816       Pml Driver HPZ12
svchost.exe     2424       TermService
svchost.exe     3312       TapiSrv
svchost.exe     2688       W3SVC

From there, it’s just a matter of shutting down or restarting each of the services listed under the process id 888 ( I got this from taskmanager).

• Fun with Cryptography Here's a little Friday fun from Monty at MR01001101. He's got Cryptography and Steganography essays and, here's the fun bit, puzzles that take the user through a chain of tests...
• Lessons in Software Development From the Apollo Moon Missions. Monday was the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. The story of the Apollo program is an historic and inspirational one, but it's also relevant to software development....
• Free Firewall Recommendations (Protect Yourself Online With These Free Firewalls) If your home computer is connected to the internet, or to other computers that are connected to the internet - you need a firewall. It's as simple as that. Hackers...
• Dude, Where's my Folder treeview?! After a wee bit O' overzealous registry cleaning last week, I had a minor panic. Well, a picture being worth a 1000 words, here's what I saw when I opened...
• Microsoft FxCop doesn't like Microsoft generated code! The other day I thought it might be nice to "do the right thing" and give my code a run against Microsoft's FxCop. I ran it right out of the...

• Review Me This is a "Sponsored Post" for the Review Me website. What a great idea for a creating a win-win situation for promoting a service or website reviews used as an promotional tool where you bring advertisers and bloggers together by giving them both a place to share their thoughts critiques about each other......
• Tennis Glossary pt5 Court - The length of the tennis court is 78 feet and the width of the tennis court is 27 feet when dealing with singles matches. For doubles matches, the length remains the same but the court is 36 feet in width. The court is divided along its middle with......
• should I tip or not? If you're careful with your money you probably face a frequent dilemma of how much to tip various people in service positions. Tipping ranges from the $3 slipped to a doorman who hails a cab to a couple of hundred for some guys who move your stuff cross-country. Before I......
• Tennis Scoring A game of tennis starts with the service and ends when a player has scored 4 points, as long as they are also 2 points ahead of their opponent. Games are generally part of a set, which is a series of games played until one player has reached six wins,......
• The Unmatched Windows XP Broadband - Cable Tweaks Guide Does your connection crawl? I bet it does buddy, just try these few simple tweaks, lets get you fixed today. The following tweaks and modifications are the ones I personally perform to my Cable connection after fresh installing windows.Note-This Guide works with DSL and Cable Connections!The first thing I......