If I step away from my laptop, after a few minutes, I'll often hear the fans spin up. I was wondering what process might be doing this so I left Task Manager open. Here's what I noticed was at the top when this happens:
If I move the mouse, the CPU usage of "System" drops and the fans spin down after a bit.
I noticed this popular question on superuser:
Troubleshoot High CPU usage by the "System" process
However, the approach there doesn't appear to be applicable since as I mention above, if interact with the system, the issue goes away. So If I attempt to use the diagnostic tools, the issue is not longer occuring.
Any suggestions on what might be causing 'System' to run at this high rate?
UPDATE
OK, I went ahead with approach in the linked post as recommended by the comments below.
For reference, here's how I started wpr.exe:
wpr.exe -start GeneralProfile
I then waited for the fans to spin up (took about 5 minutes). I left the system alone for about a minute. I then stopped wpr.exe:
wpr.exe -stop abc.etl
Here's the data as shown in Windows Performance Analyzer:
The linked post has a section on:
ntoskrnl.exe!RtlpGenericRandomPatternWorker
which seems to be the issue here. Looking into that now. :-)
UPDATE
When I open the Task Scheduler and look under:
Microsoft > Windows > MemoryDiagnostic > RunFullMemoryDiagnostic
I see the following:
UPDATE
After the issue occurred again, I refreshed Task Scheduler and indeed, the 'Last Run Time' for RunFullMemoryDiagnostic was updated:
So it seems that maybe when the system is idle, RunFullMemoryDiagnostic begins to run (fans spin up) and then it ends ("terminated unexpectedly"). Since it didn't complete, it just keeps trying.
If I do a google search for:
"RunFullMemoryDiagnostic" "the process terminated unexpectedly"
only 4 results come up.
UPDATE
For now, I've set RunFullMemoryDiagnostic to Disabled.
