Number of active processes in Win 10 Creator

[glricht]

Over the years, I've often looked at the number of active processes to get a feel on how a PC was functioning. If I saw a PC with a low-end chip, 4 GB of ram, but had 120+ active processes, it was almost a given that it was running a lot of software or needed to be cleaned up (e.g. infections, start-up list, etc.) -- or both.

Recently, I've noticed that PCs running Windows 10 Creator had a larger-than-I-expected number of active processes. Last week, I updated a Win 10 Anniversary with 85 processes to Win 10 Creator that resulted in 110 processes. Huh?

To see if I was imagining things, I dragged out an old test machine (Dell Optiplex 755, Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.3GHz and 4GB of memory) and tried to do an apples-to-apples comparison between Anniversary and Creator. The Win 10 install media used was from MS and didn't include any OEM-provided bloatware or security software. I tried to create two identical systems with the only difference being Anniversary and Creator.

First, nuked the HD and did a clean install of Win 10 Anniversary:

• Setup a local account and made the settings the same as what I would use for a typical residential customer
  
• Used Snappy to update the drivers
• At this point, it was 1607 14939.0 and had 48 active processes at steady-state
  
• After applying all updates, it was 1607 14393.1480 and still had 48 active processes at steady-state

So far, so good.

Then, nuked the HD and did a clean install of Win 10 Creator:

• Again, I setup a local account and made the settings the same as what I would use for a typical residential customer
  
• Again, I used Snappy to update the drivers
• At this point, it was 1703 15063.0 and had 118 processes at steady-state!
  
• After applying all updates, it was 1703 15063.483 and had 108 processes at steady-state.

I'm at a loss to explain the drastic change. The PC also seems a bit more sluggish with Creator than Anniversary, but nothing I can pinpoint other than a vague "feeling".

Anybody seen this?

 

[fincoder]

old test machine (Dell Optiplex 755, Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.3GHz and 4GB of memory)

SSD or HDD?

I use a PC with Core 2 Duo E7400 2.8GHz with 4GB RAM and an SSD (as my every day office computer). After upgrading to 1703 I found it noticeably faster. Not a lot, just enough to notice. It currently has 63 background processes listed in Task Manager.

I have a refurb laptop on display that had a clean install of Windows 10 and all updates a couple of weeks ago. It's been turned on and woken up to show customers etc. It currently has 41 background processes.

EDIT: I was using the Background Processes count in the main processes list, and forgot there was another group further down for Windows Processes (with default view Group By Type).
The laptop above with clean install of Creators has 110 processes in total.

After applying all updates, it was 1703 15063.483 and had 108 processes at steady-state.

Maybe it settles after some time. It would be interesting to check after it was running for a few days.

My advice would be that your rule-of-thumb about the number of active processes is just not really useful any more

EDIT: or maybe if we can figure out what the new 'normal' is.

 

[GTP]

Maybe there's a lot more "spyware" in the latest iteration Microsoft's Spy Tool.

 

[mraikes]

... snipped...

My advice would be that your rule-of-thumb about the number of active processes is just not really useful any more

I quite disagree with this. Having a feel for and paying attention to what is normal is important to troubleshooting and problem solving.

I've also noticed the jump in background processes, but hadn't connected it to the Creator's update until this thread. Good to know, so I don't waste time trying to track down and reduce processes if 100+ is now the new normal.

 

[GTP]

I've noticed that even though they hide IE and push EDGE, the ETW Collector Service is still running, along with many other "services" that can be safely disabled.

 

[Metanis]

It's rather simple, the newest version of W10 counts processes differently than all previous versions. For example, the old catch-all SVCHOST.EXE used to "hide" many sub-processes. Now it displays every one of those background things as a separate line entry. A lot of those entries are network or basic services. Things like DHCP client and DNS client used to be lumped together.

We are going to just need to re-establish our thoughts on what a proper baseline count will be. For example as I write this, the only app I am running is Chrome with 11 tabs and 5 add-ins running. Task Manager shows 144 processes. That is about double what the same load in Win7 would have reported. But the 6-core machine is barely loafing running this load. Because it ran the exact same load a few months ago but Windows reported it differently!

Here is an Answer thread that explains it much better than I can...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...ely-high/81be2c95-c16b-4632-905d-db47ea31017e

 

[glricht]

Here is an Answer thread that explains it much better than I can...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...ely-high/81be2c95-c16b-4632-905d-db47ea31017e

Thanks for the link, it does a good job of explaining the reason for the process count increase. So it seems we'll need to keep two "normal" process counts in mind: one for Creator and another for everybody else.

p.s. the process counts I reported in my OP was taken from the "Performance" tab in Task Manager. Simpler to read a number than to go to the "processes" tab and count them.

 

[Diggs]

My advice would be that your rule-of-thumb about the number of active processes is just not really useful any more

I agree with this. (AVG/McAfee anti-virus alone spreads out 12-15 processes.) Unless I really spend the time to investigate what's installed on a clients computer in detail I really don't care how many processes. Sort by size, disk activity and CPU activity and if nothing stands out I don't even worry about the count.