{"id":96,"date":"2016-02-12T13:50:43","date_gmt":"2016-02-12T13:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/?p=96"},"modified":"2021-03-30T07:58:48","modified_gmt":"2021-03-30T06:58:48","slug":"windows-updates-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/2016\/02\/12\/windows-updates-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Windows Updates &#8211; Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Late yesterday we agreed and released a Microsoft patch (KB3050265) to all of our managed machines. This resolves a known issue whereby in some circumstances the machines resources get eaten up by a rogue svchost process whilst it is analysing which updates are installed and\/or needed. Our testing this week has proved successful and we&#8217;ll be monitoring the progress of the updates and any noticeable changes closely.<\/p>\n<p>For a while we&#8217;ve been taking a close look at the processes that run on desktop machines relating to Windows Updates. We use a Microsoft WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) server to manage and deploy Windows updates to all CONNECT managed machines. As noted in the previous\u00a0<a title=\"Windows Updates \u2013 Part 2\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/2016\/02\/09\/windows-updates-part-2\/\" target=\"_blank\">blog post<\/a> we&#8217;d spotted a specific issue that was occurring on some machines relating to the svchost processes taking a large amount of RAM. This was tracked back to the scheduled checks machines do every day to review their update status against the WSUS server.\u00a0 We&#8217;d been deploying a script to specific machines where we have seen this issue for a while however were also aware that this was very much a short-term fix, with the problems and symptoms often re-appearing on machines.<\/p>\n<p>The Microsoft blurb describes the svchost as \u201ca generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries\u201d.\u00a0 In slightly more understandable terms Windows lumps together related system services and runs them as a svchost processes, so it&#8217;s not a one-one link between a service and a process but a group of services running together as one process. If\u00a0you look at the list of processes running on a machine you&#8217;ll find a number of these running, some within the user instance and some running at system level behind the scenes. Here&#8217;s a screenshot from my PC showing this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/files\/2016\/02\/svchost-process-list.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-147 aligncenter\" alt=\"svchost process list\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/files\/2016\/02\/svchost-process-list.png\" width=\"543\" height=\"536\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/files\/2016\/02\/svchost-process-list.png 543w, https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/files\/2016\/02\/svchost-process-list-300x296.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 543px) 100vw, 543px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Late yesterday we agreed and released a Microsoft patch (KB3050265) to all of our managed machines. This resolves a known issue whereby in some circumstances the machines resources get eaten up by a rogue svchost process whilst it is analysing &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/2016\/02\/12\/windows-updates-part-3\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":306,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42051],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-slow-pcs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/306"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-new.it.ox.ac.uk\/dst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}