Shell Infrasture Host high mem usage (sihost.exe)

[neufuse Veteran]

Anyone ever see this?

 

Anytime I access one of my camera folders that have thousands of meta tagged images in it, Shell Infrastructure Host process starts running like wild and eating up memory like wild. This only seems to happen in folders with TONS of meta tagged files in them, and once it starts doing this, it never really recovers from it, the memory stays used until you reboot, and it constantly eats CPU cycles... everything on MS's forums basically says sfcscan blah blah reinstall windows... nothing useful.... because this happens on a clean install of windows 10 and also windows 11 to me even on first launch.

I'm wondering if this has something to do with windows trying to index the files? Anyone have any experience with this issue?

 

[DKAngel]

maybe let it do its thing over night or maybe there is a way of it not scanning for metadata

 

[neufuse Veteran]

On 27/02/2023 at 23:27, DKAngel said:

maybe let it do its thing over night or maybe there is a way of it not scanning for metadata

 

it will just run forever and eventually jam the OS Shell resulting in having to kill it and / or explorer

[Brandon H Supervisor]

most of the google results I find point to the windows Photo Viewer of all things being at fault. have you tried removing that to see if there's any difference?

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/shell-infrastructure-host-high-cpu-and-memory-usage seems to have the most details of the results I found. it states the following:

Quote

Why does Shell Infrastructure Host use so much Memory?

If Shell Infrastructure Host uses so much Memory on Windows 11/10 PC, you need to uninstall the Photos app and reinstall it from the Microsoft Store. You can then restart the Shell Infrastructure Host process using Task Manager, reinstall Microsoft Redistributable packages, etc. However, if nothing works, run the System Maintenance Troubleshooter.

 

another thought is the pages do state the process is part of what renders GUI objects in the system so that makes me wonder if something is going on with the GPU (or integrated depending on setup) since you mention is happening on a clean install too