XP Pro "pauses"...

[Howard & Linda Woodard]

My machine will occassionaly pause -- I would say hang but it does
eventually come out of it -- and when I look at the active processes I see
one named cisvc.exe that is using between 35% and 80% of the CPU. Does
anyone know what this process is and why it is consuming so much CPU?

In the event that this process usage is normal, does anyone know what would
cause XP to lock up for varying intervals of time? It always frees up after
anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute.

Howard

 

[Jym]

Read this link for explanation. Jym
http://www.reger24.de/prozesse/cisvc.exe.html

 

[Mike Mulligan]

The Microsoft Index Service Helper monitors the memory usage of the
Microsoft Indexing Service (cidaemon.exe) and automatically restarts
cidaemon.exe if it uses more than 40Mb of memory.

Mike Mulligan

 

[GSV Three Minds in a Can]

My machine will occassionaly pause -- I would say hang but it does
eventually come out of it -- and when I look at the active processes I see
one named cisvc.exe that is using between 35% and 80% of the CPU. Does
anyone know what this process is and why it is consuming so much CPU?

In the event that this process usage is normal, does anyone know what would
cause XP to lock up for varying intervals of time? It always frees up after
anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute.

That is the content indexing service, and 99% of all known users have no
use for it (it builds indices of the words found in certain types of
file, for faster searching .. but you have to do a lot of searching to
make it worth the effort in disk space, cpu time, and hassle). In theory
it only runs when the machine is idle .. in real life, its idea of idle
doesn't always match the users'.

You can turn it off by unticking the 'let content indexing loose on this
drive' box at the bottom of the general tab of the properties page of
NTFS volumes. You can also disable the whole service (start, run,
services.msc) as well.

If you have office installed, you may find something called 'find fast'
do much the same sort of thing. This is another candidate for the
bit-bucket.