Windows – Very high CPU usage for Windows Audio service

cpudell-xpsserviceswindowswindows 10

I'm using a Dell XPS 13 (3960) laptop, with Windows 10 operating system.

Recently, after I was hearing loud laptop fans noises even when no high resouce programs running, I decided to check, and indeed I've seen a service called "Windows Audio" using almost 40% of the CPU.

After a restart (and not running anything) it was still doing that.
I uninstalled the audio drivers and let the OS reinstall them automatically and it seemed to repair the issue, but after a while it happened again.

It's under "Service Host: Local Service (Network Restricted)"

The process taking CPU

I've looked it up and it seems like no other issue like mine happened to anyone, and if it did, the reason had nothing to do with mine (software I don't have etc.).

Any way to check why it happens and fix it?

Edit:
If I restart the service it goes back to minimal CPU usage.

Best Answer

To see why audio service causes such a high cpu usage you need to install the Windows Performance Toolkit, which is part of the Windows 10 SDK.

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Run WPRUI.exe, select First Level, CPU Usage and click on start. Capture 1 minute of the CPU usage, now click on Save to save the data into a ETL file.

Now make a double click on the generated ETL file to open the ETL in Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA.exe), drag and drop the CPU Usage (Sampled) to analyze pane:

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Now load debug symbols in WPA and expand the stack of the svchost.exe which has a high value at % Weight (after blue line). Here look for function names to see what audio service does.

Often high cpu usage of audio service is caused by audio improvements from the audio driver. The best is to disable this improvements.

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