SearchProtocolHost.exe using 100% CPU

Hi Carlos,

did you find the problem with this fault?

I have recently started to have the same problem, trying to do almost anything on the computer is getting to be such a pain that it is almost as slow as my Raspberry Pi i have a decent spec computer (I7-3820 CPU running at 4.0 GHz 16 GB ram) running win 8.1 and 3 internal hard drives and one external drive, drive C is a SSD which when i installed it 2 years ago it would boot from power off in less than 20 seconds now it can take over 2 minutes to boot that is if it stays off when i turn it off as most mornings when i get up it has started running on its own during the night.

if i cannot get to the cause of the problem i will strip the C drive and do a clean install which i do not want to do as i have many programs installed that i don't think i will manage to reinstall again as i think i have lost half of the disks now.

if you did find the problem i would be in your debt if you will let me know what the problem was.

regards Poppy Ann.

Thanks so much - Method 4 worked!  This has been driving me crazy for weeks and spent money and time trying to fix it.  I am copying and pasting your directions in case it happens again but so happy someone figured it out.  Thanks again  (and people are absolutely correct that Microsoft should be fixing it  - I tried the troubleshooting and result was to try the Action Center for other possible fixes - no help whatsoever).

Hi Robert,

thanks for your reply, I took a look at that site which took me to a couple of others and I have to admit I have no idea how but something I did managed to cure my problem, and yes I have a lot of storage one of my problems is I use a SSD for my boot drive and it is close to full I try and only allow programs to install to that drive but also I had a 1 TB drive which was close to full but I transferred everything onto my new 4 TB drive (it took just over 5 hrs) and I have removed the 1 TB drive and fitted it into my cctv system box so it now had a hard job as it has to run full time (I think) I have no idea how long it will take to fill it up but that is not a problem as it just overwrites itself when full.

reading your answer you sound like myself who has been around computers a while but every now and then we come across a fault we either have not had before or we forgot how to cure it.

I started out with a Acorn Atom which i built myself many years ago it had 2Kb of ram but close to 1 KB was used by the operating system and I managed to write a copy of the old space invader game complete with waving arms etc the only thing i could not manage was the bonus space ships which use to go across the top of the screen every now and then as i had squeezed the program down as far as i could i ended up writing it in machine code to get enough to memory to keep the score when you hit the invaders, i was very proud of managing to do it at the time but compared with computers now with TB hard drives and multi GB ram and video cards i think people have gone backwards it seams that the better the computer the slower it ends up running due to cr*p programing due to programmers now have never had to squeeze the last bit never mind Byte out of computers.

I think that there has only been 4 versions of Windows that were worth buying 1. Win 3.1, 2. Win XP and 3. win 7 the rest have not been worth running.

anyway again thanks for your help it looks like i went a bit of topic but never mind.

regards Poppy Ann.

a decent spec computer (I7-3820 CPU running at 4.0 GHz 16 GB ram) running win 8.1 and 3 internal hard drives and one external drive, drive C is a SSD which when i installed it 2 years ago it would boot from power off in less than 20 seconds now it can take over 2 minutes to boot that is if it stays off when i turn it off as most mornings when i get up it has started running on its own during the night.

Wow.  I guess we can rule out thrashing as an "old issue".   When I first read the OP I was reminded of the problems I used to have on XP with Windows Search on my 256 MB system.    Then whenever I wanted to get anything done I had to disable the wsearch service.   Stopping it was not enough.  It would only get itself started again somehow and then start thrashing again. 

How much do you have to index?  Perhaps if it tries to do too much in RAM it could still make itself thrash even in large memory systems?

BTW recently I saw a suggestion that for W8.1 for boot performance issues we should be using the new WPR (or WPRUI) from the WPT instead of the old xbootmgr.   Unfortunately I haven't yet found a description of someone actually solving a boot performance problem with the new tool.  You can find some using the old tool and perhaps find an analogy for it.  Here's the article which made me aware of this change:

http://windowswideopen.com/category/wpr/

(BING search for

   +WPR  xbootmgr

)

Just change the search to  +WPT xbootmgr  to get descriptions of using the old tool.

HTH

Robert Aldwinckle