High CPU and memory usage on some PCs after the installation of N-able N-central Agent

Last Modified

Tue Jan 29 20:18 GMT 2019

Description

  • High CPU and memory usage on some PCs after the installation of N-able agent.
  • Everything went back to normal after removing the N-able agent.
  • The processes underneath this particular svchost instance are:
    • AeLookupSvc, Appinfo, BITS, Browser,
    • CertPropSvc, IKEEXT, iphlpsvc,
    • LanmanServer, MMCSS, ProfSvc, Schedule,
    • SENS, SessionEnv, ShellHWDetection, Themes,
    • Winmgmt, wuauserv
  • After reinstalling the agent, Windows Update service was stopped and the process returned to normal.
  • All Windows Updates are reportedly installed.

Environment

  • N-able N-central 9 or later

Solution

  1. Have you performed a clean install of the agent?
    • More information can be found here
  2. Have you tried disabling services on the device to see if the performance improves?
    • This can be done by doing the following:
      1. Select ?All Devices
      2. Select the device in question
      3. Select Monitoring
      4. Select all services
      5. Set monitoring to OFF
      6. Enable them by type (SNMP only, then WMI only, etc) after a period of time to test
  3. Have you observed a specific time of issue?
  4. Is the usage more significant at a certain time of day?
  5. Check that the Device is fully patched, especially for this MS patch (high memory usage from the svchost):
    • More information can be found here
  6. Check for scheduled tasks (especially recurring ones like AMP based tasks or AV scans)
  7. Check for 3rd party AV or other products which could be adding load to the agent's functions.
  8. Enable debug logging on the agent (Settings > local agent > log level) and allow the issue to reoccur
  9. Contact support for further assistance.