Taskhost system service: what is it?

Everyone who uses Windows, one way or another, had to invoke the "Task Manager" to, for example, complete a hung application or track a service that loads system resources. And many people paid attention to the fact that Taskhost constantly hangs in the process tree. What is it, we'll try to figure it out. At least, we will briefly consider its purpose, functioning and some problems in the work.

Taskhost: what is it?

In general, a thorough full description of the work of the Taskhost itself, even on the vast spaces of the World Wide Web, is quite problematic. This applies to the material, designed for an ordinary user, written in a simple accessible language. Basically everything is about the technical aspect and the debray of the fundamentals of Windows. But we'll still try to look at the taskhost process. What kind of service is this now and find out.

Based on what Microsoft specialists write, the Taskhost service can be described as a means of launching 32-bit applications and programs in the system, which are presented not as a standard executable EXE file, but as a dynamic DLL containing program executable code, Which is extracted from it by this service.

The easiest way to explain this is using the example of using, say, VST-, DX- or RTAS-plugins for music programs equipped with the appropriate hosts. In this case, such virtual instruments and effects are represented by DLL files.

In some ways, this resembles the principles of the rundll32 and svchost processes, but only the first of these two services is run separately for each process, and the second is responsible for running all 32-bit applications in general. Judging by this, the Taskhost process is a duplicate, and it starts in several variants (with different attributes) to invoke several processes, but there are several dynamic libraries on one service, which sometimes results in too high a load on the system resources and hangs the entire system. In addition, there are often conflicts between the parallel processes Taskhost and Rundll32.

By the way, although taskhost is a common system process, it is run separately for each user session.

Problems with the load on system resources

So, in the "Task Manager" in the process tree and on the system resource monitor, the Taskhost service is defined as the most resource-intensive one. What is this in terms of consumption of system resources? And here's what. Since the service is launched in the singular with each of the attributes LOCAL SERVICE, SYSTEM and under the current user name, but it is responsible for launching several libraries depending on the inflated requirements of any of them, there is an increase in the load on the Taskhost file, which invariably leads to The growing consumption of CPU and RAM resources.

Weak processors simply do not have time to process this amount of information.

Can I disable the taskhost.exe service?

Now a few words about the possibility of disabling the service if there is an excessive load on the system resources. In principle, it is considered that system services like Taskhost Windows (in the sense of "operating system" itself) can not be disconnected. In the standard version it is, but this limitation can be bypassed. If you think that when you turn off this service in the system there will be some negative consequences, you are deeply mistaken. Nothing terrible will happen, but additional resources will be freed, and the speed will increase. This, above all, concerns Windows XP and Vista.

To disable it, you can use deactivation of the Task Scheduler itself or one of its functions called RacSysprepGeneralize. But that's another question.