Diagnostic Policy Service high CPU 33%

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I have Googled the high CPU usage with the Diagnostic Policy Service in Windows 10 and found several articles dealing with this. It appears to be a familiar issue with many users. The fix suggests stopping the Policy service, deleting the SRUDB.dat and then restarting your computer and supposedly problem solved. This doesn’t work for me. Can anyone shed some light on how I can lower the burden on my CPU from this service?

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I have questions about this as well – has it answered elsewhere? Or is it a victim of the AskWoody indexing issue?

I have windows 10 Home, updated from 1909 to 2004 (at v 19041.746) last month.
Lots of performance issues at start-up, which I’ve been trying to diagnose using a lot of the tips on this site.

This Diagnostics Policy Service seems to be one of the windows/MS services that shows high CPU use in Task Manager.

Some other sites recommend what the original poster has tried (WSjofo69) – stop the service, delete the SRUDB.dat and restart.

I’d like to try it if someone could please comment on this and whether it is safe to do and worth trying?
Thnx

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Make an image backup to an external USB disk.
Create and test a recovery USB/DVD.

Make the changes and let us know how it goes.

cheers, Paul

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Not sure if you’re suggesting I be a guinea pig, LOL! I was hoping someone that has already tried this could answer, or that the original post had been replied to.

I have been battling performance issues since upgrading to 2004 – I am running out of ‘paused’ time to get the Feb updates, before I’m forced to install the March ones. I am thinking of leaving these issues for now, and grabbing and installing the Feb updates (KB 4601319-CU; KB4601050-.NET CU) manually first. Perhaps they will help settle things down.
Thoughts?

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Cijan wrote:

I am running out of ‘paused’ time

Set your network connection to “metered” and updates will not download or install – effectively makes pause redundant.
When you need to update you can do it by clicking the download / install button in Windows Update, or turn off metered for the duration of the update.

cheers, Paul

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Thanks Paul.
I always leave metered connection on, which isn’t always reliable (Win 10 Home) I find. I use WUShowHide too, but it seems tricky timing wise since the advent of the Pause/Resume function was added.

I’ve done the KB install for CU manually – no issues. It may have helped a bit with performance, will do the .NET one later.

PS. I wish I’d done the upgrade to 2004 using the ISO method instead of letting Windows Update do it – I think more things got messed up. After tax season, I’ll be looking into upgrading via ISO to 20H2 if people are finding it stable and reliable. I also have some work to do to update drivers (via Dell, not MS!) but I don’t want to screw up my system during tax time, don’t have time for diagnosing/recovery processes should things fail.

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I’ve never had issues using metered connections – no unwanted downloads / installs. (Sample size of 2)

Windows Update upgrades sometimes go awry, but not seen reports of “more things messed up” after a successful upgrade. Can you provide details?

cheers, Paul

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Sorry, I’ve been busy with other things, but I appreciate your interest in this ‘messed up’ 2004 upgrade. And here’s a long list of symptoms and things tried.

Just a reminder – I have Win 2004 Home v. 19041.804 (no Group Policy editing available, and I’m not about to buy a Pro license); on Dell Inspiron 5749 laptop. Hard drive has loads of space.

I followed all the instructions (e.g. turning internet off to avoid download of unwanted MS apps, setting TRV to 2004 and any other instructions from AW on upgrading to 2004).

There are no start-up apps running (all disabled in Task Manager/Startup).
Observations:
1. Initial speed after upgrade good – no different than before – same start up time, same time to load desktop and taskbar items.
3 days later… performance is miserable, whether from shutdown, sleep or restart. Can’t even get to Task Mgr quickly. Start menu isn’t available, search box disappears when clicked on, task bar items take forever to load.
2. I tweaked a few things – turned Fast Start off, went back to Task Scheduler and had to shut telemetry off again. I turned off some other unnecessary services in services.msc (I”d have to go back to notes to see which ones… something I’ll do later).
3. Observed Search bogging down resources, so disabled the prefetch/search service, turned indexing off because it was taking forever and I see no value in it.
4. Tried uninstalling some of the MS.Bing.xx apps like weather, etc thinking maybe they were causing Cortana/Start to get bogged down.
5. Noticed loads of ESENT warnings for error 642 – decided it wasn’t anything to investigate since many (including on AW) say it’s a MS bug, and will be fixed in later patches.
6. Also noticed a lot of ESENT 474 errors, grouped together, 6 or so at a time. That’s what triggered my question here about the Software Diagnostic Policy Svc and the SRUDB.dat question. I followed Fred’s article about performance and ran the dism and other cmds to check disk, etc. All reported no issues.
7. Updated Feb CU (KB4601319) manually. Performance seemed to be better for a couple of days! Yahoo!
8. Same thing 2-3 days later, bogged down at startup again.
BIOS time from re-start is consistently 2.2 sec; from shutdown or sleep – 3.4 to 3.7 secs. I have hidden a lot of MS recommended hardware/driver upgrades, and am reluctant to start messing with them especially at tax time. I really don’t believe it’s hardware – otherwise performance wouldn’t be impacted only at start-up and then about 10 minutes into when I start to open apps (gen first to open are Outlook, Firefox). Is there is a collision of services that start at the same time? I do have Norton which I know can be a bit of a pig, and when the subscription is due in May I will likely not renew – maybe just use Win Defender and MalwareBytes. Did I inadvertently get that safeboot thing?
9. I really want to remove Cortana to see if that helps. But any instructions I find are either for Group Policy editing, registry changes or 3rd party tools or refer to settings I can’t find. In fact now, if i search for Cortana in settings, it doesn’t come up at all, I only find it in Apps/Features. So, I tried a repair (Uninstall isn’t available). Thought about going to MS Store and reinstalling, but haven’t yet.
10. I also find MS Photos almost impossible to use – takes forever to load a picture or image. I have tried repairing it too, but gave up and set photo/image default app to a different product.
Quite a rant – all the time spent makes me think next computer should be a MAC!

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Sometimes a backup and reinstall over the top is the answer. If that fails, a fresh install.

cheers, Paul

 

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‘Sometimes’?! This is what makes me think it’s time to abandon MS/Windows!
I have this sneaking suspicion that a reinstall or fresh install won’t fix the problem.

I ran across this statement by an AW member when I was searching for info on the ‘wsappx’ service:
“… Windows 10 is not made for HDDs! The performance is sluggish due to the design of tiworker, wsappx and others running at the same time killing the few IOPS of a HDD, causing fragmentation galore – I’ve seen W10 clients with 18% fragmentation – you notice a degradation at 3%.”

And that statement was made in 2019! He went on to say you need SSD to run Win10. That would imply that unless I can successfully ‘kill’ a lot of services/apps that are not necessary, I’m SOL.

After taxes are done, I will do some sort of reinstall, as you suggest.
Meanwhile, I’ll just have to go for coffee or do something else for 20 minutes while all the colliding services are hogging resources.

Question: Would one of the free 3rd party tools that manages/removes MS crapware be useful to try? Or have on-hand for post-reinstall? Any recommendation?

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Cijan wrote:

I ran across this statement by an AW member

Sample size of 1 – be careful whose advise you follow.
On the other hand, all my Windows versions from 7 to 10 benefitted hugely from having an SSD.

Cijan wrote:

Would one of the free 3rd party tools that manages/removes MS crapware be useful to try?

Up to you.
You won’t see any difference because you don’t have a machine to test back to back.

cheers, Paul

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Ya, I won’t be sinking anymore $ into hardware for this computer. If I have to start buying hardware, I’ll be re-thinking whether I want another MS product :)!

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Cijan wrote:

Question: Would one of the free 3rd party tools that manages/removes MS crapware be useful to try?

Yes. Some like ‘ Windows 10 Apps Manager‘ will let you re-install the removed crapware.

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Do you know if the ‘Weather’ and ‘Travel’ ones noted (as in picture of apps on the info page from the link you provided) are the same as the packages that show up as Microsoft.BingTravel and Microsoft.BingWeather if you run the powershell cmd to get provisioned app packages?

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And have you tried the newer 10AppsManager v 2?

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