How do you see what uses the most CPU?
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In this articleThis article helps you identify the cause of sustained high CPU usage. Keep in mind that you can expect CPU usage to increase as a process or an application serves requests. However, if you consistently see CPU usage remain at a high level (80 percent or greater) for prolonged periods, the performance of your system or application will suffer. For that reason, it's important to understand the cause of sustained high CPU usage to be able to correct the problem, if possible. Task ManagerUse Task Manager to view CPU consumption to help identify the process or application that's causing high CPU usage:
If the process can be stopped, or a related service can be disabled, stop the process or the service. Then, check whether this mitigates the problem. Resource MonitorUse the Resource Monitor to view CPU consumption:
If any of the processes show a higher-than-expected rate of consumption for your environment, consider these top processes first when you try to determine the cause of the problem. Process ExplorerThe Process Explorer tool gives you a complete overview on which processes are currently running on your computer, including details about who invoked the processes, and how much of the total system resources they're consuming. If you want to verify an operating system-related process (for example, System), follow these steps:
Note To get a better stack information result, configure symbols in the Process Explorer. To do this, follow these steps:
Common troubleshooting scenariosThis section introduces the scenarios of different processes that use high CPU usage. Uniquely named singular Microsoft process
Svchost processIf a svchost process consumes high CPU usage, and the svchost process contains more than one service, you need to break each service out to run in its own svchost process to determine which service is causing the high CPU usage. To do so, follow these steps:
Multiple process instances that have the same nameSeveral instances of a process could share the same name. For example, this problem could occur with the explorer.exe processes on a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server. To troubleshoot this problem, follow these steps:
Third-party application processIf a third-process is identified as the cause of the problem, you must contact the application vendor to understand why the respective process is causing high CPU usage on the computer. Data collectionBefore the problem occursYou can use Debug Diagnostic 2.0 version to further troubleshoot this problem. To use the tool, follow these steps.
When the problem occurs
We recommend that you keep the information that you've gathered handy in case you have to contact Microsoft Support. How do you see what is using the most CPU?In the full Task Manager window, click the “Processes” tab. You will see a readout of all the active processes and the resources they're using. Processes are any applications or programs running on your computer, including vital system functions that run silently in the background.
What is using up all my CPU?Click on More details near the bottom of the window. Not only will you see many more programs listed, you'll see the system resources each is using. Click on the “CPU” column header. This will sort the list of running software in order of decreasing processor usage.
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