Svchost.exe is the process that hosts other Windows services that perform various system functions. You may have multiple instances of svchost.exe running on your computer, each containing a separate service. Some time ago we posted a message about what you can do if svchost.exe is putting a heavy load on your CPU.
In this article, I will show you several ways to view the actual process or service running inside svchost.exe. Most Windows PCs run between 10 and 20 of these processes. If there is a problem and one particular svchost.exe process is causing the problem, you can probably easily fix it if you know which service is running inside that process.
Task Manager
If you’re using Windows 10, you don’t need to look beyond the Task Manager. Click Start and type task manager, or just press and hold CTRL + SHIFT + ESC on your keyboard. This will bring up the task manager. If you see a small box with a list of currently running programs, do not forget to click “Details” at the bottom.
Then click on the Processes tab and scroll through the Applications and Background Processes list until you get to Windows Processes. Keep scrolling down until you see Service Host:. There should be quite a few of them on the list.
As you can see, each service host will have a service name followed by a semicolon. This makes it easy to see which service is associated with which svchost.exe process. If you need to see the exact process ID, just right-click on the row and choose Go to Details.
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You will automatically go to the Details tab and automatically select the line that matches this process.
We can now see that the DHCP client service is running inside svchost.exe with process ID 1504. This is by far the easiest way to accomplish this task, but it requires Windows 10. If you are using Windows 7 or earlier, read about others methods.
To-do list command
On any version of Windows, you can use the command line to create a list of all svchost.exe processes along with the service that is running inside each of them. To do this, simply open a Command Prompt by clicking Start and typing cmd.
At the command line, copy / paste the following command:
tasklist / svc | find “svchost.exe”
This will generate a list of all running processes, pass that list to the find command, and filter so that only svchost.exe processes are displayed. If you want to output this to a text file, use the following command:
tasklist / svc | find “svchost.exe” c: tasklist.txt
Note that in order to output to the root of the C drive, you need to open an Administrator Command Prompt (Start, type cmd, right-click Command Prompt and select “Run as Administrator”). If it’s easier, you can change the path to something else, for example C: Users username Documents.
Process explorer
Finally, you can use a third-party program from Microsoft called Process Explorer Just download it, unzip and run the EXE file. You don’t need to install anything, which is convenient.
Click the Process column heading to sort the list of processes, then scroll down until you see svchost.exe. Go ahead and hover your mouse over any process and it will show you the services associated with that process.
So these are some simple and easy ways to learn more about the svchost.exe process and what is running inside each one. Enjoy!
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