December 29th, 2020

What are these duplicate services whose names differ just by random characters at the end?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you open Task Manager and go to the Services tab, you may find that there are some services which appear to be exact duplicates of each other, except that there are random characters appended to them.

Name PID Description Status
⚙CaptureService_8453a   CaptureService_8453a Stopped
⚙CaptureService_63f05   CaptureService_63f05 Stopped
⚙CDPUserSvc_8453a 6256 Connected Devices Platform User Se… Running
⚙CDPUserSvc_63f05 7016 Connected Devices Platform User Se… Running

As I noted in passing some time ago, some services are system-wide, and others are per-user. The ones that are system-wide have a single instance, but the ones that are per-user have a separate instance for each user. And the system appends a unique random number to the names of per-user services to keep them from colliding.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Tips/Support

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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