MsMpEng.exe - How do I kill it?

[Minami Minegishi]

I play a very old and non-impactful online game called Day of Defeat and I usually never have issues unless I have done something daft like left my torrents running. In the last couple of days I have been getting insane lag, to the point where it is now unplayable.

I think it is this pesky MsMpEng.exe file that people seem to have a lot of trouble with.

At the moment I am running Chrome and Task Manager only and my Memory is an eye-watering 15.9GB (23%). MsMpEng.exe alone is taking 231,512K.

I mean I also seem to have a fuckton of shit running despite none of the apps running (NordVPN, Lenovo shit, MS Office, etc). All of them disabled, all of them drawing over 30,000k. Including MSEdge.exe which I have obvs never used.

I've done the MsMpEng.exe troubleshooting and no luck so far, including completely shutting down MS Defender completely.

Any help would be appreciated because when I close everything down this fucker's fan is still clacking away.

[seepage]

MsMpEng.exe taking 231,512K = 231 MB is obviously a small portion of 15.9GB. If 15.9GB is 23% looks like you have 64GB RAM installed, in which case 15.9GB doesn't look like an issue. Click the CPU column in Task Manager to see if a program is taking up a lot of CPU %

[Shaxberd]

That's the anti malware scanner thing, right? Maybe you can turn on your computer some time before you intend to start playing and let it run through the scan. You could also try scheduling scans for the middle of the night and leaving your computer on rather than shutting it down when not in use.
I've noticed Windows updates and scans really slow down my laptop as well, but it's less of an issue if I use it more frequently because they don't need to do it every day, and although it takes a while, the scan does finish eventually.

[Minami Minegishi]

MsMpEng.exe taking 231,512K = 231 MB is obviously a small portion of 15.9GB. If 15.9GB is 23% looks like you have 64GB RAM installed, in which case 15.9GB doesn't look like an issue. Click the CPU column in Task Manager to see if a program is taking up a lot of CPU %

That's the anti malware scanner thing, right? Maybe you can turn on your computer some time before you intend to start playing and let it run through the scan. You could also try scheduling scans for the middle of the night and leaving your computer on rather than shutting it down when not in use.
I've noticed Windows updates and scans really slow down my laptop as well, but it's less of an issue if I use it more frequently because they don't need to do it every day, and although it takes a while, the scan does finish eventually.

Thanks guys - it's still doing this today and I don't know what's going on. I could only just about get these screengrabs because my mouse cursor is just jumping around, and my keyboard just keeps cutting in and out. Explorer keeps pausing and crashing/restarting.

Do these images help?

https://flic.kr/p/2pxBL39
https://flic.kr/p/2pxB14w

[Milo]

Complete list of the contents of the Processes tab is probably the most useful thing to see.

[Minami Minegishi]

Complete list of the contents of the Processes tab is probably the most useful thing to see.

Cheers - it's a huge list but here is the start of it. I can grab the whole thing if that helps.

One thing I noticed is that even though I only had cookdandbombd open in one tab in chrome, it is showing 14 separate chrome operations, and it can jump up to 20. I forced closed them and I got destop alerts about apps closing (Nord, Adblocker, and a bunch of others. They all reopened when I restarted chrome.

https://flic.kr/p/2pxGbkN
https://flic.kr/p/2pxLLZi

[Milo]

Don't see anything untoward in that lot. I doubt it's the memory use of msmpeng that's causing issues either.

Next thing I'd probably do is to Start > Run and run compmgmt.msc

Look at the Windows logs under System, see if there's anything generating a large number of errors. If the system isn't being excessively stressed then I'd guess at a drive beginning to fail as the most likely cause of problems.

[Minami Minegishi]

Don't see anything untoward in that lot. I doubt it's the memory use of msmpeng that's causing issues either.

Next thing I'd probably do is to Start > Run and run compmgmt.msc

Look at the Windows logs under System, see if there's anything generating a large number of errors. If the system isn't being excessively stressed then I'd guess at a drive beginning to fail as the most likely cause of problems.

Thanks Milo - I appreciate the time taken to help. It's not that old really, I got it in maybe 2016 and it had a good spec but can't even run Windows 11 apparently. I definitely can't afford a new PC so I think I will just make sure everything is backed up to a cloud and see if slow death occurs.

I will look at windows logs now and I might ask for more advice dependent on what it says.

[Minami Minegishi]

Next thing I'd probably do is to Start > Run and run compmgmt.msc

Look at the Windows logs under System, see if there's anything generating a large number of errors. If the system isn't being excessively stressed then I'd guess at a drive beginning to fail as the most likely cause of problems.

How does this look? As you can tell, I'm not completely stupid but also I am:

https://flic.kr/p/2pxGqjK

[Milo]

The logs are under Event Viewer, two down from System Tools. Should be a System section under Event Viewer.

[Minami Minegishi]

The logs are under Event Viewer, two down from System Tools. Should be a System section under Event Viewer.

Got ya - ok, so I filtered by 'Level' and there appears to be a fuck-ton of Warning related to NTFS and 'disk' but I have an external drive that I use for media streaming that always gives me 'there is a problem with this drive' messages when I plug it in so it could be that.

Also a fuck-ton of Errors (Service Control Manager, disk, DistributedCOM, Server, Event Log etc).

And at the top of my filtered list three Critical with Kernel-Power as source.

[Milo]

"there's a problem with this drive" is usually triggered when a drive with certain file systems is unplugged without being safely removed. It'll keep coming up until the drive is scanned for errors and will come up again if it's not safely removed.

Kernel power is usually if the system is switched off without being shut down.

The disk/ntfs ones might be concerning. If you double click one of them it'll let you see more details. If there's something like "an error was detected during a paging operation" the drive is likely to be on its way out.

[Minami Minegishi]

The disk/ntfs ones might be concerning. If you double click one of them it'll let you see more details. If there's something like "an error was detected during a paging operation" the drive is likely to be on its way out.

None of this looks good:

https://flic.kr/p/2pxMiwF
https://flic.kr/p/2pxMiwA

[Milo]

Is the F drive an internal one? But yeah, doesn't look great. What I'd do is remove the external drive, sort the list of events by date/time again, close it down, do some stuff with the system for a bit and see if new disk errors appear.

[Minami Minegishi]

Is the F drive an internal one? But yeah, doesn't look great. What I'd do is remove the external drive, sort the list of events by date/time again, close it down, do some stuff with the system for a bit and see if new disk errors appear.

I thought my external drive was D, but actually it's F. So, if I fully eject the F drive I might actually see a change, possibly. Also, it's a 1TB drive that I use for all my films and TV and streams through Emby to my TV. I wonder if this is the issue, because I notice I have maxed it out with only 13GB left on it. Could this be the issue?

Right now, I'm going to do what you say and keep an eye on it and start looking for some cheap laptops. Thanks Milo.

Edit: My disk is not ejecting because it's 'in use' but it isn't - I don't even have Emby running at all. I guess at this point I would simply pull the fucker out which is probably why I am having these issues in the first place.

[Milo]

The external being nearly full shouldn't cause any problems but any connected drive that's generating errors can make the whole system glitchy. Leave it unplugged and see it things improve as if it's the external drive that's an easier fix than the whole laptop.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Cheers - it's a huge list but here is the start of it. I can grab the whole thing if that helps.

One thing I noticed is that even though I only had cookdandbombd open in one tab in chrome, it is showing 14 separate chrome operations, and it can jump up to 20. I forced closed them and I got destop alerts about apps closing (Nord, Adblocker, and a bunch of others. They all reopened when I restarted chrome.

https://flic.kr/p/2pxGbkN
https://flic.kr/p/2pxLLZi

Click the top of the cpu usage tab to make it sort into order, with most usage at the top, since you're mostly worried about those ones.

14 chrome processes seems a lot, but remember chrome makes a process for every tab open, and one for every addon.

[Minami Minegishi]

Click the top of the cpu usage tab to make it sort into order, with most usage at the top, since you're mostly worried about those ones.

14 chrome processes seems a lot, but remember chrome makes a process for every tab open, and one for every addon.

This?

https://flic.kr/p/2pxB14w

The external being nearly full shouldn't cause any problems but any connected drive that's generating errors can make the whole system glitchy. Leave it unplugged and see it things improve as if it's the external drive that's an easier fix than the whole laptop.

I wasn't able to safely eject the drive as the PC is convinced it is being used. So I shut it down, took the drive and restarted. Probably just as bad as ripping it out, but in any case my PC has been running a LOT better. I'm wondering if I just need to get a better external drive. I tend to just buy cheap ones and not the SSDs.

[Milo]

Unplugging the drive while the pc is off won't hurt anything. By the sounds of it you don't necessarily need a better external drive, you need one that's not broken. If you've got anything critical on there then get it stored somewhere else as soon as you can. If those errors are referring to the external drive (and it looks like they are) then that drive will be accumulating more damage whenever it's spinning and it could die altogether at any moment.

Keep an eye on the logs with it unplugged though, just in case there's an issue with an internal disk too.

[JesusAndYourBush]

This?

No,  you've sorted it by memory, not CPU usage.  The screenshot shows zeros all the way down, with an "01" about halfway down.  1% cpu usage is nothing to worry about but there may be other stuff further down that the image doesn't capture. (From what you said about having trouble taking the screenshots you should see something hogging the cpu, I'd assume.)

[Milo]

I'm confident it's that hard drive causing the issues. Windows is terrible at handling stuff like that and goes glitchy as hell.

[earl_sleek]

Years back I turned on my PC, it took ages to boot and once I got into Windows it was incredibly laggy and wouldn't open any applications. It also couldn't shut down. I unplugged everything and it worked fine, and by a process of elimination I discovered the cause was an external HD that had apparently died overnight. So malfunctioning external drives can definitely make your computer act up in non-intuitive ways.

[Minami Minegishi]

No,  you've sorted it by memory, not CPU usage.  The screenshot shows zeros all the way down, with an "01" about halfway down.  1% cpu usage is nothing to worry about but there may be other stuff further down that the image doesn't capture. (From what you said about having trouble taking the screenshots you should see something hogging the cpu, I'd assume.)

Gotya. OK, so I don't have the drive in so I don't know if this is useful anymore:
https://flic.kr/p/2pxSiZr

I'm confident it's that hard drive causing the issues. Windows is terrible at handling stuff like that and goes glitchy as hell.

Years back I turned on my PC, it took ages to boot and once I got into Windows it was incredibly laggy and wouldn't open any applications. It also couldn't shut down. I unplugged everything and it worked fine, and by a process of elimination I discovered the cause was an external HD that had apparently died overnight. So malfunctioning external drives can definitely make your computer act up in non-intuitive ways.

Yeah, it does seem to be running ok without the drive in. I assume I need a new, better and more reliable drive, but that is for another day.

Can't thank you enough for your help guys. Really.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Gotya. OK, so I don't have the drive in so I don't know if this is useful anymore:
https://flic.kr/p/2pxSiZr

Yeah, it does seem to be running ok without the drive in. I assume I need a new, better and more reliable drive, but that is for another day.

Yeah, if you had task manager open while the funny business was happening, a malfunctioning drive would probably not have shown up with any excessive cpu usage.  Although that would have shown that the problem had nothing to do with cpu usage and to look elsewhere.

[Minami Minegishi]

Yeah, if you had task manager open while the funny business was happening, a malfunctioning drive would probably not have shown up with any excessive cpu usage.  Although that would have shown that the problem had nothing to do with cpu usage and to look elsewhere.

Honestly, I feel completely daft that it is a shitty, failing external hard drive that has managed to make my PC become possessed.

It's currently running fine.

[Milo]

Honestly, I feel completely daft that it is a shitty, failing external hard drive that has managed to make my PC become possessed.

It's currently running fine.

To be fair, there's no reason to think that would cause Windows to completely shit itself. It's just something I've come across a few times with our work PCs is all.