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High CPU on Windows 2008 R2 with WMIPRVSE Solved (2012)
If you've been searching in frustration for this, here's another answer but itonly applies in one particular case. I've just been upgrading a rented VPS that I got through 123-reg.co.uk. It uses Plesk 10 which is very good. I needed to upgrade the version of PHP as by default the highest it offered (Plesk version 10.2) was something like Php 5.1.17 which WordPress did not like.
There was an update available for Plesk and not knowing whether it was up to me or 123-reg support to upgrade it, I went down the "Better to ask forgiveness than permission route" and upgraded it to the available 10.4.4. All very easy, just a few mouse clicks. Before I did this I'd updated Windows 2008 R2 as well. There were 54 important updates so it took an hour or two.
Upgrading a remore server, whether virtual or not is always a bit scary. If anything goes wrong it might not reboot but all went well. It rebooted but it seemed a bit sluggish. Task manager confirmed that WmiPrvse.exe was gobbling up between 20 and 50% CPU. I lost a few more follicles.
p>Delving in with Sysinternals (I know its now Microsoft but the name still sticks) showed that tzres.dll was being called a lot of times each second. And searching found a lot of references to Windows 2008 R2, WmiPrvse and tzres.dll but I checked and nowhere was WSRM being used. That seemed the answer in a lot of cases. But not mine.
I tried a few things, looked at way too many Microsoft pages but no joy. Something was using WMI but what?
Plesk How Could You?
Just on a whim I searched Plesk's site and found this little gem which says. When the Health Monitor is enabled in Parallels Plesk Panel installed on Windows 2008, the process manager shows a high CPU load. The process WmiPrvSE.exe is always on top of CPU consumption.i>
Now that supposedly applied to Plesk 10.2, 10.3 but in my case 10.4.4. (Yes I've rold them). The answer as they suggest is to disable two of their services. I did and the CPU is down to a quiescent 1% or so which probably comes from Terminal server accessing the server.
