SVCHOST.EXE overload

[pekkerhead]

Here is a heads up, and perhaps someone may wish to comment on what further action should be taken.

I'm not sure what has done it - I just recently installed the latest spybot and firefox versions (two days ago) and found that my internet access has slowed to a snail's pace. I think it may Spybot?

Task manager revealed that one of the svchost.exe applications was chewing up my memory (80-99%) for around 5 minutes everytime a process needed to access the internet, also my LAN connection kept dropping out. Very annoying.

It turns out it is my oversized 'Hosts' file (which I am sure was fine previous to these installations). I have had to disable the 'DNS client' service on my PC (which loads the hosts file into cache everytime it needs to resolve a web address) and low and behold everything is back to normal (if not quicker). Obviously though now I don't have the advantage of being able to use the hosts file for domain name resolution.

[shri]

Sounds rather strange.

I've got the standard S&D hosts file (several hundred lines?) and have not noticed any spikes - even minimal on the computer.

How large is your hosts file anyways?

[pekkerhead]

well it's 219KB, but that doesn't strike me as particularly big compared to my physical memory.

Anyway, I've been experimenting and it is definitely the DNS client that is clogging up the PC. Almost as soon as I start it up SVCHOST goes into overdrive and my browser hangs waiting for the process to free up some memory.

I wonder what else the DNS client does that could be impacting this?