Windows 7 checking for Windows Updates cause memory use to blow up

Question

It started doing this a couple weeks ago, had NEVER done this before.

Windows 7 Home Premium.

Basically, when Windows checks for updates now, the memory used by the svchost process that holds wuauserv blows up in memory use:

from ~23000K in task manager to 650000K or higher. The highest I'd ever seen it go over the past few years were always ~200000k at max, now occasionally it even goes up to 1000000K+!

I've googled around but can't seem to find any solutions. Any ideas? :( Disabling windows update isn't an option because even if I manually tell it to update this happens.

Answer 1

This is a normal behavior which you can't fix. The more updates you have installed the, the higher the memory usage grows.

Windows Updates needs to check which updates you have installed and which nes you need and this takes some time and memory.

You can try to cleanup WinSxS by installing update KB2852386 and running disk cleanup. Look if this reduces the memory usage.

In June 2015, Microsoft fixed the high Memory usage during Windows Update scan with the fix KB3050265:

Fixes included in this update

This update addresses an issue in which system performance can be decreased during scans. This issue has the greatest effect on computers that have a small amount of physical memory.