So, greetings,
I'm pretty new to windows 8, I've been using a legit MSDNA copy since early november. I found out windows 8 are pretty slicky and decent, had no problems overall. But, I can assure you I am a gamer, and I need a smooth dedicated 100% cpu "headroom", 24/7. So, tiworker.exe, a system process new to me, started draining my cpu resources up to 50%, suddenly, during a game, making it choppy-unplayable-unstable. Just killing the task isn't enough, as it re-executes itself -obviously as a system process- just a second after. My question is, IS there a way to manualy close-open it, schedule it or even disable it completely? Or maybe make it a little faster somehow?

Thanks in advance.

GV

While tiworker.exe could be a legit process just in case run Malwarebytes as the name is also used by malware.

Please download the free version of Malwarebytes.
Update it immediately.
Do a full system scan
Let us know the results at the end.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products

TiWorker is a legit Windows file. This is the trustedinstaller which installs updates and enables Windows features.

@Gogos Venge

You can use 3rd party tools like Prio (http://www.prnwatch.com/prio.html) to set the priority to low.

I have a similar problem, TiWorker takes an enormous time to start on an ASUS UX31A with Windows 8. Thanks for your help.

Level Date and Time Source Event ID Task Category
Error 11/23/2012 11:40:17 PM Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance 101 Boot Performance Monitoring "This application took longer than usual to start up, resulting in a performance degradation in the system startup process:
     File Name  : TiWorker.exe
     Friendly Name  : Windows Modules Installer Worker
     Version  : 6.2.9200.16384 (win8_rtm.120725-1247)
     Total Time  : 62714ms
     Degradation Time : 57714ms
     Incident Time (UTC) : 2012-11-23T22:38:21.738002100Z"

• Proposed as answer by progettomayhem Tuesday, July 21, 2015 9:02 PM

I have a similar problem, TiWorker takes an enormous time to start on an ASUS UX31A with Windows 8. Thanks for your help.

Level Date and Time Source Event ID Task Category
Error 11/23/2012 11:40:17 PM Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance 101 Boot Performance Monitoring "This application took longer than usual to start up, resulting in a performance degradation in the system startup process:
     File Name  : TiWorker.exe
     Friendly Name  : Windows Modules Installer Worker
     Version  : 6.2.9200.16384 (win8_rtm.120725-1247)
     Total Time  : 62714ms
     Degradation Time : 57714ms
     Incident Time (UTC) : 2012-11-23T22:38:21.738002100Z"

I've the same problem, not even reducing process priority helps. This is very annoying, since killing it constantly, seem to not effect anything I'm doing. Can't this work be throttled? It's taking up 50% (100% of 1 of my 2 cpu's) of my system resources about every 1-2 hours for about 3-5 minutes. You might think that's acceptable for a background service, but I do not! This isn't just windows 8, I noticed it on vista too (what I had prior to windows 8). See Thread.Sleep() AND make it a multiple processor application so my cpu fan isn't driving at max speed!

• Edited by JoshGuyette Wednesday, November 28, 2012 2:49 PM

I've the same problem, not even reducing process priority helps. This is very annoying, since killing it constantly, seem to not effect anything I'm doing. Can't this work be throttled? It's taking up 50% (100% of 1 of my 2 cpu's) of my system resources about every 1-2 hours for about 3-5 minutes. You might think that's acceptable for a background service, but I do not! This isn't just windows 8, I noticed it on vista too (what I had prior to windows 8). See Thread.Sleep() AND make it a multiple processor application so my cpu fan isn't driving at max speed!

Please run xperf.

xperf -on latency -stackwalk profile -buffersize 1024 -MaxFile 256 -FileMode Circular && timeout -1 && xperf -d HighCPUUsage.etl

@Pierre and Josh

Please run xperf.

Install the WPT (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4847.install-the-windows-performance-toolkit-wpt-en-us.aspx), open a CMD prompt with admin rights and type this:

xperf -on latency -stackwalk profile -buffersize 1024 -MaxFile 256 -FileMode Circular && timeout -1 && xperf -d HighCPUUsage.etl

after you captured 30s of the high CPU usage of TiWorker, go back to CMD prompt and press a key to stop the logging. Now compress the HighCPUUSage.etl as 7z (LZMA2, ULTRA) to reduce the size. Upload this file to your SkyDrive or Dropbox and post a

Thank you for your answer. I have uploaded the original record and the HighCPUUsage-file to SkyDrive but I am not allowed to post the link here. ("Body text cannot contain images or links until we are able to verify your account" message)

Since this happened I had problems with SearchIndex and tried to solve them by renaming the korwbrkr-files by adding .bak. This looks weird. Is it possible to remove all complex languages i.e. Korean, Thai, Chinese etc?<o:p></o:p>

I can't see any high CPU usage of TiWorker in your trace file (CPu is idle for 92%) and TiWorker is not running at the time. Also capture at least 30s to get good data.

Run the commands again when you see the high CPU usage again.

Microsoft released an update to fix the TiWorker issues:

A servicing stack update is available for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2771431/en-us

Issue 1

Please install the update o fix your issue.

December 18, 2012

^^ If you're foolish enough to install the optional Bing Desktop from Microsoft Update, as I did... You should install the above update.  Seems that the Bing Desktop install reverts you back to a state before this was fixed (or at least causes the same issue).

• Edited by The Visitors Tuesday, December 18, 2012 3:48 PM

December 18, 2012

^^ If you're foolish enough to install the optional Bing Desktop from Microsoft Update, as I did... You should install the above update.  Seems that the Bing Desktop install reverts you back to a state before this was fixed (or at least causes the same issue).

I've tried this update (also on an asus x55u) and the update does not finish.  It's been saying "Copying packages to the windows update cache" for at least an hour and the cpu is 99%.

This is a brand new machine with nothing installed.

• Edited by poofactory Friday, December 28, 2012 11:39 PM

I've tried this update (also on an asus x55u) and the update does not finish.  It's been saying "Copying packages to the windows update cache" for at least an hour and the cpu is 99%.

This is a brand new machine with nothing installed.

extract the MSU and use DISM to install the CAB update file:

Dism /online /Add-Package /PackagePath:C:\<path>\Windows8-RT-KB2771431-x64.cab

Totally agree with Taupo Tech.  The problems are still there even with Update 2771431 which eats up CPU and puts the computer fan into overdrive big time slowing down the system. 

Other than this issue, I'm quite happy with the under-the-hood improvements of Windows 8 which greatly improve performance on my Core 2 Solo 1.4gHz (Single Core) U3500 over Windows 7.

run the xperf commands and give m

In my quest to resolve my problem of Windows 8 Pro (which has all the latest Windows updates) freezing from time to time, I disabled Windows Updates and the search indexing for Drive C but that made no difference. 

I then came across a wildcard suggestion on the web that suggested turning on Hyper V (Bing search for: Windows 8 freezes Here is a fix Martin Brinkmann)

• "Use Windows-C to open the Charms bar on the desktop and select Settings > Control Panel from the options.
  Select Uninstall a Program here.
  Select Turn Windows features on or off on the left sidebar and check the Hyper-V box on the Windows Features window that opens up."

To my knowledge, I don't have software that requires Hyper V.  But so far, this appears to have improved things for an unexplained reason as haven't had any freezes when browsing the net on Firefox all day.  The freezes previously would last half a minute up to two minutes (until I hit the ctrl-alt-del key and go into task manager).

Interestingly, in the Process Monitor logs, there are many references to Hyper V with 'Success' under the Results.  Maybe the Windows system was trying to access something but because Hyper V was disabled, it just resulted in a high CPU situation and constant freezing especially when the screen dimmed power saver setting then came into being.

• Proposed as answer by JakeMcD Saturday, October 12, 2013 4:09 PM

I look into all previous solutions but no effect. I installed the MS KB2771431 (which was already installed)... still I get my cpu up for 3-4 minutes every 15-20 minutes...

in your case the Defender service and Explroer.exe cause the high CPU usage. The tiworker was not running at this.

In my quest to resolve my problem of Windows 8 Pro (which has all the latest Windows updates) freezing from time to time, I disabled Windows Updates and the search indexing for Drive C but that made no difference. 

I then came across a wildcard suggestion on the web that suggested turning on Hyper V (Bing search for: Windows 8 freezes Here is a fix Martin Brinkmann)

• "Use Windows-C to open the Charms bar on the desktop and select Settings > Control Panel from the options.
  Select Uninstall a Program here.
  Select Turn Windows features on or off on the left sidebar and check the Hyper-V box on the Windows Features window that opens up."

To my knowledge, I don't have software that requires Hyper V.  But so far, this appears to have improved things for an unexplained reason as haven't had any freezes when browsing the net on Firefox all day.  The freezes previously would last half a minute up to two minutes (until I hit the ctrl-alt-del key and go into task manager).

Interestingly, in the Process Monitor logs, there are many references to Hyper V with 'Success' under the Results.  Maybe the Windows system was trying to access something but because Hyper V was disabled, it just resulted in a high CPU situation and constant freezing especially when the screen dimmed power saver setting then came into being.

MsMpEng.exe and explorer.exe can take 50-60% of cpu... it's happening every 10-15 minutes even if I do nothing.

Can I stop MsMpEng.exe to work that way? With windows 7 and my ssd drive my laptop was noiseless during night... now it's not.

Can I remove Defender service and use 3rd party software?

Install a 3rd party software (which is Windows 8 compatible! Many tools are currently not Win8 ready), those tools disable Defender during setup.

The Explorer usage comes from XML parsing which you used the search.

I have the problem in a VMWare image. That image I used to host from Win7 - there I did not notice the problem - it might have been there.
Anyway - now the host is Win8, too and now I certainly have the problem.

In the guest I have the kb/2771431 installed. It is also a WP8 dev machine, so it has the WP8 emulator running in hyper-v - inside VMWare - but I haven't been using it while having Win8 as host.

I also saw the virus checker in the host at some time be the busy process, so I configured it not to read the folder where the guest was placed - that was not a solution, but maybe part of a solution?

Then I have seen svchost.exe (defragsvc) on the guest taking all the disk IO. In services it is called "Optimize drives". I have just now changed it from Manual to Disabled.

I could do that on the on the host, too. Crossing fingers - hopes it does the trick.

This servicing stack update did not do anything to fix the problem when the Windows Module Installer Worker was just  beating on my new hard drives.  As I was downloading this update, a task began looking for updates and then ended with a message that this update was not correct for my computer.  Eventually I shut the computer off and when I got up the next morning the Installer Worker began hammering away again.  I opened up the Task Manager and ended the Worker task but it restarted and this update began reinstalling and ended with "This update is already installed" and the Worker then stopped.  It took a moment until I decided to retry the Windows update KB278119 that fails with error 80070003.  After the update failed, the Worker started and began the heavy disk access.  I ran the reinstall on this update and the Worker stopped again.  So every time I do updates and one fails I guess I'll reinstall this update.  

Something is wrong with the Windows Module Installer Worker, when an update fails, it just keeps running with heavy access on the hard drives.

Yes. TIWorker runs away on the hard disk, but when I go to Windows Update to check, it stops momentarily. When it informs that no new updates are available, TIWorker resumes pounding on my disk shortly after.

It's April 12, and Microsoft hasn't fixed this issue. It doesn't seem to affect my CPU or available memory, just the HDD, which it keeps grinding on. It's annoying.

Until they fix this, I'm just disabling TIWorker.

okay, this is what i have done. i got my new comp yeaster day, a toshiba, with widows 8. I have been conserned with the high cpu usage on the pc, some times it Svchost.exe or tiworker.exe or CCC.exe and it is a treible annoyance. i have uploaded my High cpu usage etl on dropbox public https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50925725/kernel.etl 

Help me out please

• Edited by Jim ebbesson Saturday, June 01, 2013 7:39 PM

okay, this is what i have done. i got my new comp yeaster day, a toshiba, with widows 8. I have been conserned with the high cpu usage on the pc, some times it Svchost.exe or tiworker.exe or CCC.exe and it is a treible annoyance. i have uploaded my High cpu usage etl on dropbox public https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50925725/kernel.etl 

Help me out please

the kernel.etl is useles on a different PC. I can't get the symbols.

Run the xperf -d command to dump it correctly into a proper ETL file.

the kernel.etl is useles on a different PC. I can't get the symbols.

Run the xperf -d command to dump it correctly into a proper ETL

run the command I posted in november 2012.

In the path where you run the command you should see the generated file.

I'll add to the people having problems with this process; hangs out with ~50% CPU through reboots. Here's the xperf output:

http://sdrv.ms/15Tm670

I thought I would disable the service, but it even gets itself re-enabled. It may be prudent to mention that I had to disable these two Windows updates, as they consistently failed installation: KB2781197 and KB2822241. Just recently there have been a few more that haven't been able to install, but I haven't pinpointed which. I'll be re-installing Windows shortly. The KB mentioned above, KB2771431 has been installed since last December.

Edit: My app log is full of watson crashes, many a minute, from WindowsWcpOtherFailure3
I don't know if it's related, but I thought I'd upload one of the reports: http://sdrv.ms/15Tnk2l

• Edited by Mannerisky Sunday, June 30, 2013 4:38 AM added watson

I'll add to the people having problems with this process; hangs out with ~50% CPU through reboots. Here's the xperf output:

http://sdrv.ms/15Tm670

I thought I would disable the service, but it even gets itself re-enabled. It may be prudent to mention that I had to disable these two Windows updates, as they consistently failed installation: KB2781197 and KB2822241. Just recently there have been a few more that haven't been able to install, but I haven't pinpointed which. I'll be re-installing Windows shortly. The KB mentioned above, KB2771431 has been installed since last December.

Edit: My app log is full of watson crashes, many a minute, from WindowsWcpOtherFailure3
I don't know if it's related, but I thought I'd upload one of the reports: http://sdrv.ms/15Tnk2l

The HighCPU usage comes from TiWorker to check if updates are required or can be skipped.

I also see that you get a lot of errors. The wermgr.exe creates and sends error reports. This also casues CPU usage.

You should run DISM to detect and repair corrupted files

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

http://blogs.technet.com/b/joscon/archive/2012/09/26/fixing-component-store-corruption-in-windows-8-and-windows-server-2012.aspx

The HighCPU usage comes from TiWorker to check if updates are required or can be skipped.

 

Thanks for the investigation Andre. DISM couldn't fix the issue, but going through the cbs.log I think I'm going to call it a corrupt disk causing a windows update to fail in a way that TIWorker can't handle. CHKDSK is finding a bunch of errors. My plan is to finish chkdsk, reboot, and retry the failed windows updates. If that doesn't work, I think it will be time to replace the hard drive.

For others on this thread, do you also have failed updates? DISM is supposed to repair them, but one reason it may not be able to is if your disk is bad.

If WinSE is listening, TIWorker shouldn't use 50% CPU permanently, no matter the root cause.

In my quest to resolve my problem of Windows 8 Pro (which has all the latest Windows updates) freezing from time to time, I disabled Windows Updates and the search indexing for Drive C but that made no difference. 

I then came across a wildcard suggestion on the web that suggested turning on Hyper V (Bing search for: Windows 8 freezes Here is a fix Martin Brinkmann)

• "Use Windows-C to open the Charms bar on the desktop and select Settings > Control Panel from the options.
  Select Uninstall a Program here.
  Select Turn Windows features on or off on the left sidebar and check the Hyper-V box on the Windows Features window that opens up."

To my knowledge, I don't have software that requires Hyper V.  But so far, this appears to have improved things for an unexplained reason as haven't had any freezes when browsing the net on Firefox all day.  The freezes previously would last half a minute up to two minutes (until I hit the ctrl-alt-del key and go into task manager).

Interestingly, in the Process Monitor logs, there are many references to Hyper V with 'Success' under the Results.  Maybe the Windows system was trying to access something but because Hyper V was disabled, it just resulted in a high CPU situation and constant freezing especially when the screen dimmed power saver setting then came into being.

provide a xperf trace, so that I can help you.

MS released a new Servicing Stack update which compresses/cleans up WinSxS, this may cause some CPU usage.

ok, did chkdsk fix the HDD? Are you now able to install the Updates?

ok, did chkdsk fix the HDD? Are you now able to install the Updates?

• Proposed as answer by MatthiasSchneider6 Thursday, August 13, 2015 2:54 PM

Yes and yes. And now I don't see TIWorker. That seems to have been the problem.

I have this "update" installed on my system and still get tiworker.exe problems.

C:\windows\system32>xperf -on latency -stackwalk profile -buffersize 1024 -MaxFi
le 256 -FileMode Circular && timeout -1 && xperf -d HighCPUUsage.etl
xperf: error: NT Kernel Logger: Access is denied. (0x5).

Tried to run the cmd, got this error msg. ???

TiWorker.exe is gobbling up 25-40% cpu atm, 60-100% hdd usage. Been this way for about 2 hrs now. All updates to date are installed (including the stack fix). Xperf is installed, but cannot run the cmd.

xperf: error: NT Kernel Logger: Access is denied. (0x5).

Tried to run the cmd, got this error msg. ???

you must run this from a cmd.exe with ADMIN rights:

http://superuser.com/questions/497252/how-to-access-the-administrator-command-prompt-in-windows-8

I have the same issues described above: repeated high CPU usage by tiworker.exe. I tried to install the above update and Win8 64 tells me that it's already installed. I will say this is one thing I noticed. I have auto update turned on and Win 8 64 has never asked me anything as it does it all in the background. However, last week I had a message that Windows Update needed my permission to proceed in which I said yes and also asked for a reboot in which I did. I noticed a new Homegroup icon on my desktop after and that is when these high CPU usage issues started. I hope this sheds some light as I am also a gamer and it is effecting my FPS negatively.

Thanks for any effort and help forthcoming.

Hi, I have a 2 weeks old Win8 laptop and I notice that tiworker.exe from time to time gets 100% HD utilization for very long periods of time (>30min) unless I kill the process, which I frequently do to be able to use the computer at all. I did run the xperf trace as instructed above, here is a link to the compressed file:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=9C3D6B1013FD2908!116

I would be grateful for any help in this matter.

Certainly. I have a swedish language installation of windows 8 but I made sure that all the options in the drop down are visible for clarity. This image shows the settings I had during the trace capture: https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=9c3d6b1013fd2908#cid=9C3D6B1013FD2908&id=9C3D6B1013FD2908!228&v=3

 This second image shows the settings I currently have, in an attempt to prevent this problem from happening: https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=9c3d6b1013fd2908#cid=9C3D6B1013FD2908&id=9C3D6B1013FD2908!229&v=3

However in both cases I have the same problem, TiWorker.exe starts automatically, uses the hard drive a lot (100% according to task manager) for a very long time.

this is wired. The trace showed that you installed updates, but the settings should mean "notify me about new updates and let me choose when to install them".

I have just experienced the high CPU usage and the culprit according to Task Manager was TiWorker.exe, having read this article, I checked windows update and found I have just had 32 updates automatically installed when I had the setting set to download and ask me what to install. The setting has somehow been changed to automatic, I have never allowed that to happen on any system.

Now I have to do a system restore back to a time prior to these updates.

Same here: 50% CPU (100% of one of my 2 cores) sucked by TiWorker.exe @ Win8 Pro 64bit causing my CPU fan go from silent to very annoying :)

Tried lowering priority, activating Hyper-V, installing KB 2771431... to no avail

HOWEVER: today (Sep21) ran Windows Update and the problem seems gone! I hope it stays that way :)

Also hitting this issue on new Windows 8 Enterprise Edition.  The Servicing Stack update didn't not help but what did help was to:

1. Set system to never check for updates(probably not needed as only when I did step 2 did the issue go away).

2. Disabled the Windows Update Service (in services.msc)
Rebooted pc and so far the tiworker.exe process no longer appears in Task Manager.

I can live without windows updates for the moment until MS release a hotfix that fixes the problem.

Jelly Bell's suggestion of installing the Hyper-V comportment worked for me. My next restart showed the Windows Update service taking about 20% CPU, then it dropped down to nothing. Prior to this, my "System Interrupts" were showing ~20% CPU usage on a four-core.

Odd that installing a piece of Hyper-V would work....

Also having a similar issue. File link below: 

https%onedrive%live%com

redir?resid=89CB55A7133CCC51!608&authkey=!ANJ8suwf4HLIyGs&ithint=file%2c7z

Says im a new user so I replaced colons and slashes with %