F-secure hoarding processes

AJalink

This is extremely strange - on my daughter's pc which is protected under my subscription, she has at least 25 instances of "F-Secure plugin hosting service" appearing in her task manager. (See attached screenshot).

1 - she's done a complete shut down and restart - didn't solve it.

2 - she checked for updates, it says it's totally up to date

3 - yes, her windows is completely up to date, short of upgrading to win11 which she has not done. She is using Windows 10 Home.

Help?? I just checked my pc (I'm on windows pro) and I don't have the same thing happening, so perhaps it's something with Win 10 home?

Suggestions? At some points it has had her cpu at 100%.

Ukko

Hello,

Sorry for my reply. I am also only an F-Secure user.

First of all, could it be that her experience is about F-Secure ID Protection? And, for example, not only F-Secure SAFE (as with your system)?

In general, I mean next point: I tried with my system and the only "view" (as with your screenshot), but about one instance "F-Secure plugin hosting service", is related to F-Secure ID Protection (with my device - its beta build). It can be just useful to know with which solution there is a trouble.

As a general suggestion:

-- can you verify that F-Secure SAFE UI with a proper state about its protection and any 'on-going' tasks.

There also was, at the time, description of "reliability mechanism" after crash for its services: disk usage 99% and multiple instances of fshoster32.exe running — F-Secure Community - but the situation should be improved after 'rebooting' system (maybe instead of "shut down" -> "turn on").

In addition, it can be useful to create "dump file" (as discussed there: F-Secure Host Process high CPU usage — F-Secure Community) to further investigation later.

CPU usage as such (occasional) described there: CP overload computers with their processes (F-Secure Host Process ) — F-Secure Community

I think, the best try is to reinstall F-Secure SAFE (if this is the trouble solution) after trying to reboot/restart system (in addition to shutdown; if it was not this action in your first step).

Thanks!

Ville

Hi,

As @Ukko already mentioned, there is a built-in reliability mechanism that can cause this behavior. Usually all functionality of the product is kept in a couple of processes. If something crashes, the mechanism separates the functionality parts into separate processes so that the unreliable part will not take down rest of the functionality. It looks exactly like your screenshot. It should automatically fix itself when for example computer is rebooted, if the crash problem has gone away.

Please note that this mechanism by itself will not increase CPU usage. There must be something else wrong if your CPU usage is at 100%, but from the screenshot that can't be seen (all of our processes are at ~0%).

As @Ukko suggest, simplest option may be to uninstall and reinstall, which may fix whatever is wrong with the installation. Otherwise, we would need to investigate the logs to figure out the root cause of the problem.

Ville

(F-Secure R&D)