Odd errors in report

[polycrac]

Hi All,

I'm getting some odd errors in my performance monitoring reports - yesterday it was telling me I needed drivers, though I couldn't find any that were not already the best ones installed, when I checked through the device manager. Today I'm getting missing info and a very high CPU use. Any ideas?

 

[SpyderTracks]

Hi All,

I'm getting some odd errors in my performance monitoring reports - yesterday it was telling me I needed drivers, though I couldn't find any that were not already the best ones installed, when I checked through the device manager. Today I'm getting missing info and a very high CPU use. Any ideas?

View attachment 12362

Check your cpu load and which processes are using it and post the results.

Check if your windows update history shows lots of failed updates.

Remember, windows update won’t find proper driver packages for graphics or any management drivers, those will need to be installed from source.

 

[polycrac]

Thanks, these are for (just about) the same 60s. The performance monitor says there is a major CPU hog, but the task manager disagrees!



I updated Windows yesterday and it all seemed to go fine.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Thanks, these are for (just about) the same 60s. The performance monitor says there is a major CPU hog, but the task manager disagrees!
View attachment 12363
View attachment 12364

I updated Windows yesterday and it all seemed to go fine.

How odd! Like you say looks like the performance report is talking nonsense.

Gimme a while, will have a scout on the web.

 

[ubuysa]

The Task Manager report has a default update speed (the Normal speed) of 2 seconds and it's most likely missing the transient high CPU usage process. You can change the update speed to High when it samples every 0.5 seconds, but even that may miss transient peaks. What is clear from the Performance Monitor and Task Manager reports, assuming they are for the same interval of course, is that the high CPU usage is very transient (a spike) and can thus probably be ignored - unless it causes problems.

When using any performance monitoring tool you need to be aware of the sampling rate, especially when comparing two reporting tools as you are here.

The taskhostw.exe process is a hosting process (like svchost.exe) and it's used to host Windows functions that exist only as a dll (rather than an exe file). Dlls can't start a process as exe files can so they have to run in a host process. Unfortunately if any of the dlls become corrupted or develop a bug it's the host process that gets the blame. You can see all the dlls that are running in taskhostw.exe by opening an elevated prompt and entering the command 'tasklist /M /FI "IMAGENAME eq taskhostw.exe"' (without the single quotes) but I doubt it will help you much because they're all system dlls.

I do know that the Fast Startup feature has been associated with taskhostw.exe issues so turning that off (it's in Power Options) would be a good idea.

Although this is a favourite when people report problems it's worth running an 'sfc /scannow' command to check for system file errors.

If you suspect it was a Windows update that might have caused this then back the update out and see whether the issue goes as well.

On balance, I wouldn't lose any sleep over this unless it begins to cause you performance problems.

 

[polycrac]

Thank you Ubuysa, I appreciate the time you took. That just about makes sense to me - I'm not really worried about performance - everything seems to run fine, despite the warnings, but with a new PC I wanted to try and iron out any bugs. I'll look into the fast start up options and try the scanning options you suggest this weekend!