Tag: Services
CPU Spikes with WinHTTP Web Proxy Service
by admin on Mar.28, 2008, under Software, Systems
Ran across something interesting this week. I was looking into performance on some of our webservers and noticed that there would be unexplained CPU spikes every once in a while. No real spikes in traffic, no additional tasks going on.
In the event logs I did find something that correlated with the CPU spikes:
Event ID: 7036
“The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the running state.”
Event ID: 7036
“The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the stopped state.”
This happens many times a day, starting and stopping. When in transition it seemed to spike the CPU for a little while.
Service Description is the following:
Implements the Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) protocol for Windows HTTP Services (WinHTTP). WPAD is a protocol to enable an HTTP client to automatically discover a proxy configuration. If this service is stopped or disabled, the WPAD protocol will be executed within the HTTP client’s process instead of an external service process; there would be no loss of functionality as a result.
In looking into this more I found this is not needed to run IIS or anything else on your server. Only needed for your browser on your server to detect a proxy for Internet browsing. So do yourself a favor and disable this service, you will see it most likely set as manual and stopped but don’t let this fool you. Check out your event logs and if you see it starting and stopping disable it.
