Windows Server high WMI usage

Question

Hello,

One of our customers is having difficulty with performance on their remote access server. Their remote access server is a virtualised server, being Windows Server 2019.

The issue is, throughout the day the WMI Provider Host will hammer away at the CPU usage, slowing down performance for all users that are remoted in. We have a fix on record which we can apply to improve the performance and to stop the WMI provider from taking up so many resources, however this isn't convenient as usually our customer calls to report the issue first, and over time it's taking up a lot of our time and is an overall inconvenience which we would like to get to the bottom of.

What is very interesting is that the same issue was affecting their previous server, which was Windows Server 2012. We moved the customer to the new server as Server 2012 is approaching end of life, we were confident that upon moving servers, the issue would be resolved, however it's carried on over, likely because we did a virtual to virtual copy of the server.

The server is fully patched, we've tested it without the Anti-Virus on, various bits of the customer's software uninstalled etc. but we haven't been able to figure this out as of yet! All of our other customer's server environments are absolutely fine in regards to the WMI provider.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

There is a good writeup on WMI troubleshooting here.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wmisdk/wmi-troubleshooting