Why does dllhost.exe Com surrogate consumes memory untill crash

Downloaded a 3D Trailer in MP4, side by side coded. My Standard MP4-Icon was shown and nothing out of the ordinary happened for a while. Except moving the file seemed impossible, but copying to another hdd worked.

A while later I got a system freeze (during a flash vid in fullscreen), complete with NumLock dead. But the system recovered a few minutes later.

Then came a Message, that I was out of memory, which actually was true, according to the Task Manager.

Culprit was dllhost.exe which I could watch hogging all Memory it could get. After killing it with the Task Manager it started over again, leaking Memory every second.

Searching the net suggeted something to do with the Thumbnails and I also found this Thread.

I renamed the Trailer's extenstion from mp4 to unknown. The action could only be completed by killing dllhost.exe again. After doing that for both copies of the 3d-mp4, the Memory situation was normal again.

Conclusion: Kudos to my Win7 64 Home Premium for actually recovering from such a situation without reboot or blue screen, shame on the programmers of a non critical background process like thumbnails to allow for critically failing the system by infinite memory leak and not every malfunction is a malware or virus.

WORKAROUND at least for me: Changing the extension to a video extension that the system does not generate thumbnails for. In my case .mkv (not tested with Windows Media Player as I use other players)

Thanks Simon, your quick fix works perfectly. It solved my problem instantly and i was able to delete the file after changing the extension and now everything is back to normal :D

Hi.

First of all, I apologize for my English. I am from Brazil, and just "felt" on this topic with a Google search. And I did not read all answers to check if the problem is solved, I just want to help with something I got here today.

In my case, the problem appears to be with thumbnails generation, like some of you wrote here, but I don't work with 3D videos here, only 2D, most MP4 and MKV encoding. The main problem were the codecs I have installed here. I don't know wich ones you have, but is a good idea to uninstall them, restart your PC, use CCleaner to clean thumbnail cache and junk files. After that open Task Manager and check if the process is running. If it is not, just try to install the codecs again and check if there are newer versions of them.

I hope it was usefull in any way.

To recap the issue:

The dllhost can eat up all memory till the system crashes. This could have several causes, one is a bug in the thumbnailsystem. If the deactivation of the thumbnailsystem can fix the memory leak, you know for sure. (One would probably have to reboot or kill the process to see any changes)

The update KB2670838 which also gets installed along with IE10 (!) has several side effects. One of them is the introduction of a memory leak when trying to generate a thumbnail for certain mp4 files, typically 3D Side by Side. Search for files which should have a thumbnail but have a standard icon (the current file causing the leak will also be unmoveable, undeleteable etc). The thumbnail cache plays a role in this too. If you have valid thumbnails for a file and install an update or codecs or would like to test this, there will be no error till the next time the thumbnail is actually created.

It is possible, that there are other causes for these problems as well and it is possible that not all systems are prone to that memory leak. Other side effects of the update point to a combo of intel and amd hardware.

--

As for my system, there is no combo, only amd here. And either hiding the 3D-mp4 (rename so no thumb will be generated) or deinstalling KB2670838 works. Because yet another side effect of this update broke functions of my tv card software, I prefer to not install the update. There is KB2834140, an update to the update, which was aimed to repair other errors caused by KB2670838 but this did nothing to the issue with thumbnails.

Hi.

First of all, I apologize for my English. I am from Brazil, and just "felt" on this topic with a Google search. And I did not read all answers to check if the problem is solved, I just want to help with something I got here today.

In my case, the problem appears to be with thumbnails generation, like some of you wrote here, but I don't work with 3D videos here, only 2D, most MP4 and MKV encoding. The main problem were the codecs I have installed here. I don't know wich ones you have, but is a good idea to uninstall them, restart your PC, use CCleaner to clean thumbnail cache and junk files. After that open Task Manager and check if the process is running. If it is not, just try to install the codecs again and check if there are newer versions of them.

I hope it was usefull in any way.

This appears to be a common issue for those people using Sony 3D Bloggie cameras.  Windows updates are the likely cause.  My machine is always looking for something that it can't find until it crashes due to the dllhost sucking memory.

I don't think that this is helping Sony, camera manufactures, content providers, or the 3D TV makers that predict a bright future for 3D TV yet do nothing to support it, and complain that their sales did not meet their unfounded predictions for their unsupported products.  And Microsoft will let us figure this out for them or simply pretend that is is not their problem or an issue that they created.

Why does dllhost.exe  Com surrogate consumes memory untill crash.

It happens when I highlight or view a folder containing video files, Even if I close the folder or select a different folder the memory keeps getting consumed.

It seems to happen mostly with 3D Video files but it has done the same with 2D files.

So it seems to be a problem with the windows thumb nail system dealing with these files.

By the way trying to delete or move the file or folder while the Com Surrogate is consuming memory Delete can not complete the task.

What I have been doing is finding offending file selecting Delete, then go to task manager stopping Com Surrogate, then the file will delete.

Have scoured the net and found scores of solutions suggesting - running the system file checker, registry cleaners, modifying the startup and so on...these do not solve the problem. 

As noticed by other users and on other sites, the problem crops up after running Hi-Def multimedia files typically .mp4 file extension in my case afterplaying such hi-def files usingbuilt-in Windows Media Player 10

**Also I am not sure if this has relevance but I noticed this happening after I had updated to IE10 recently.**Till such time IE 8 was in and had not noticed such a problem

1 quick fixthat I use to resolve the problem in Win7 is as follows

Open Task Manager -> Go To Process Tab, Locate the "dllHost.exe" entry . Right click on it, and use "End Process Tree",  this will kill the process that spawned the dllhost.exe and restore the system to normal state. Open the Task Manager again and check for the entry it does not list again till the next time a hi def file is played using Windows Media Player

This needs to be done whenever the dllhost.exe is found to cause high Memory usage.

Please note that using the End Process  option will NOT work as the dllHost.exe will be re-spawned.

Problem is seen from Vista time frame, has propagated to Win7 versions as well.

Although there are threads within Microsoft communities that a Specific Windows update is the cause of the problem(http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-pictures/why-is-dllhostexe-crashing-while-trying-to-create/940e114b-e87e-45ff-8d33-0a5abf15bca9)..I still what might have caused the problem would be used to address the problem. Hopefully Microsoft might already have solution for this problem and same could be received via Windows updates.

-Viena7