Task manager, system process usage

I just saw something odd in our desktop computer, and I was looking because when I went to check the OE mail just now, I thought the windows seemed kind of laggy to open. My son has a few Firefox windows open right now, about 3 of them have Youtube video's loaded, and Firefox is using over 200,000 K of memory when I looked in the taskmanager process list. Well, I scrolled down on that list, and much to my surprise, System was only using about 9,000 K. It is usually 60,000 - 70,000 K roughly. The laptop I am currently using is using 78,000 K for System. This 9,000 K figure is something I've never seen before. Can anyone explain this? This seems pretty weird.

The computer in question is a Windows XP Media Center Edition SP2. AVG free 8.5 and Malwarebytes are running in the background for security. Once the avg's e-mail scanner closed, things were back to normal as far as my opening e-mails was concerned, the lagginess subsided.

 

Hello, Halo, and thank for your reply. Is Process Explorer one of those things that sits there and doesn't do anything unless you run it? I've seen suggestions posted to people who are having malware problems to use Process Explorer to find and end bad processes when malware won't allow task manager to run. I don't like installing extra stuff, but if Process Explorer just sits quietly and does not run in the background all the time, I wouldn't mind using that. It would be interesting to see what is using the System process. I would also like to see what uses svchost.exe. It irritates me that so many services run on one svchost.exe process and a person can't easily see what those services are. At least not without going to a command prompt.

In Task Manager, when I go down the list of running processes, the user for a lot of them is "SYSTEM". At the end of the list is the process "System", with its PID of 04, and this is the item that generally uses about 60,000 or so K of memory on this computer and that's not unusual. So for it to be reading 9,000 K really caught my attention. I've never seen this number that low before. I don't know how long its been like that. I don't want to close up Firefox at the moment, since my son has these 8 tabs open and 3 of them are loaded Youtube video's. But at the end of the day, I would be interested to see if a reboot shows the same thing. I was wondering if certain processes were using up a lot of memory, if the computer would draw resources FROM something else. As in--is the heavy memory usage of Firefox taking away from what the process called System would otherwise be using? I do notice slowness when I try to explore the hard drive. For example, I went to My Computer, then C, then Documents and Settings to look at something, and each window was slow to open. Same thing when I opened the control panel--it was momentarily blank with the little scanning flashlight icon before the icons appeared.

As for the e-mail scanning, I am hearing of that point of view more and more, that it is rather redundant having incoming e-mail scanned. I've also read that one could end up corrupting one's e-mails by having the AV scan it as it comes in. What I would like, however, is to leave on outbound scanning, in case any nasty that wanted to send out e-mails ever got onto the computer.

 

Process Explorer is not installed. It is an exe. I have it sitting on my desktop. When I want to see what is running, I click it. When I'm done, I close it.

 

OK, thanks Plodr. Looks pretty simple. (I like that! :-D)

 

To update: My son said the computer froze (with 8 Firefox tabs open, including the 3 YouTube pages) and he ended up hard booting. He re-opened Firefox afterward, but not those YouTube pages. When I checked Taskmanager, Firefox was using about 115,000 K of memory and System was back to its normal usage, which was about 78,000 K.

I've used Process Explorer. Neat program! It showed everything all the...I don't know what you would call them, when you click on the plus signs. Everything shows up as opened, so those signs are all minus. It looks like at the moment, everything else is under the "System" process, as when I click the minus sign next to System, everything else disappears. Smss.exe is under System, csrss.exe has its own pathway under smss.exe, and then there is winlogon.exe which is under System, and all the other processes are under winlogon.exe. (I don't know how to explain this very clearly, sorry!) It would have been interesting to see how all of that looked when I first posted about this.

Thanks for the recommendation, and I'll keep an eye on this situation to see if it happens again. I'll have to learn how to use this, and I'm wondering if Process Explorer shows how much memory a process is consuming the way taskmanager does.

My son places pretty heavy demands on this computer and the browser when it comes to resources. Good thing he's getting his own pretty soon!

 

Well, I don't really understand how these things work, but at the moment, Task Manager is showing Firefox (with several open pages, including about 3 of loaded Youtube videos) consuming 302,000 k. System (PID 4) has 376 k. That's three hundred seventy six. Normal is about 78,000 - 79,000 or thereabouts. Maybe the high 60,000's...I've been watching this over the past few days, and I've noticed when Firefox consumption is high, like when it's been running all day, System can be low, like running in the 20,000 range. Tonight is an all time low.

My son tends to leave Firefox open all day. He's been watching YouTube videos in HD as well. Other processes on the computer do work, but it's pretty sluggish. Sometimes when he uses Firefox like this, the computer will freeze and has to be hard booted. Sometimes he runs Gimp while Firefox is open, and he's had the occasional freeze up with that as well. Doesn't happen often, which is good because I don't like a computer being treated that way.

The computer has 1 Gb of RAM for physical memory. So is this what's going on then, Firefox et al using up available memory, leading to slowdowns and maybe some system instability? The freezeups don't happen that often, but the computer sure does get slowed down if we want to do anything else with it. I warned him tonight that the whole thing could very well freeze up on him.

Process Explorer shows System and then a whole bunch of stuff under that. (Is that the "tree"?) Firefox is under Explorer.exe in Process Explorer.

While I'm at it, I'm wondering about 'overclocking', and I don't really know what that is. What I do know is that this system is nearly 4 years old and in that time, we replaced the PSU after about 2 1/2 years. A year later, we replaced the PSU again. Both times the fans were making grinding noises. The inside of the case was cleaned out both times, the dust inside. The most recent PSU started making the noise again after less than 2 months, so now its on its 3rd PSU. The original was 450W, the second one was 500W, and the one that's in now is 575W and has 2 fans, so hopefully it'll do better. When the second one crapped out, it was extremely hot to the touch. Could pushing the computer's resources be causing this?

I'm just curious, trying to learn about how things work. My son is getting his own laptop pretty soon, so he can push the resources on that. :-D He says it has 4 Gb of memory.