High CPU utilization due to WmiPrvSE and svchost process

Question

Hi Team,

I am receiving high CPU utilization alerts randomly on all my production servers (Windows Server 2019 - EC2 Instance) due to the below processes. The alerts does not last long, 10 - 30 Minutes maximum, then it is going back to normal. However it happens randomly on different servers.

WmiPrvSE

svchost#30

WmiPrvSE#4

WmiPrvSE#2

Can anyone help me to fix this issue.

Answer 1

Hi.

According to your description, WmiPrvSE and SVCHOST.EXE lead to High CPU.

The WmiPrvSE.exe process is an important part of Windows and usually runs in the background. This process should not normally use many system resources, but it can use a lot of CPU if another process on the system behaves poorly.

You can try to find out which process is causing WmiPrvSE.exe to occupy High CPU with the following steps.

• Open Event Viewer and click Applications and Service Logs/Microsoft/Windows/WMI-Activity/Operational;
• Scroll through the list and look for recent Error events. Click each event, and then look for the number to the right of ClientProcessId in the bottom pane. This tells you the ID number of the process that caused the WMI error;
• Open Task Manager and locate the process that matches the ID number shown in the Event Viewer log;
• Uninstall the application or disable the service.

SVCHOST.EXE is an important host process, a system can have multiple SVCHOST.EXE running, and each SVCHOST.EXE can also host multiple services. Troubleshooting high CPU usage with SVCHOST.EXE can be difficult because Task Manager or Performance Monitor cannot show which service in SVCHOST.EXE is causing the problem. It is recommended that you use Process Explorer to see which process on SVCHOST.EXE is causing High CPU and find the PID.

You can also refer to this document: [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-performance-team/prf-high-cpu-svchost-exe/ba-p/373745

Hope the information is helpful.

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