Saturday, June 18, 2016

When critical OS processes consume too much CPU

Today I dealt with the issue of lsass.exe consuming an insane amount of CPU and making the machine run exceptionally slowly. A quick Google search turned up nothing helpful. Since I already had Task Manager open, I tried setting the offending process's priority to Below Normal. (Terminating that process is not an option.) Updating the priority actually worked. It kept using a lot of CPU when nothing else was going on, but the system became vastly more usable.

Of course, this solution is less than ideal, and according to the Task Manager warning, may lead to system problems. It's working for the moment, at least.

1 comment:

  1. I saw this recently as well on a client's machine and it turned out to be Chrome causing lsass.exe to run at high cycles. Reinstalling Chrome made no difference. Didn't have time to ProcMon or dig deeper.

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