Take the 2-minute tour ×

I have a problem that has been causing me all sorts of grief recently. SVCHost appears to be leaking resources all over the shop.

This is the SVCHost run with the arguments "-k netsvcs".

At the moment it is sitting at around 5,700 Handles being used. Before I rebooted the machine it was sitting at around 33,000 handles! This higher number has been causing me large problems as my software, thus, fails to obtain the handles it needs (The software tries to create around 2000 handles).

I'm totally at a loss as to what is going wrong. IF anyone could help me stop this happening it would be much appreciated.

I'm running on XP with SP3.

Edit: I tracked this problem down to the WMI system. I'm not sure why or how the problem was occurring. Basically I used "sc change" to move it into its own process and suddenly everything seems to be fine. I'm not entirely sure what is going on ...

share|improve this question
add comment

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Just in case anyone is interested I discovered that I had a slight error inside some WMI using code. The system was failing to release a WMI object. Once the code was modified the problem went away.

Alas it never occurred to me that a leak in MY code would cause a leak in svchost :(

Now don't get me started on the non-paged pool memory leak a colleague and I just discovered in the "Dell Control Point Security Manager" :(

share|improve this answer
add comment

Do you run a local MySQL Server, XAMPP, WAMPP or so? If your answer is yes, then that's your issue. In MySQL, if you have InnoDB engine, it'll bring around 30,000+ handles.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Try running Process Explorer from SysInternals to see what's going on in the svchost process that is causing the problem.


share|improve this answer
Thanks I have tried that already. I'll update my question. –  Goz Oct 2 '09 at 15:04
add comment

Your Answer


