This has worked very good for months, with the CPU going up (executing the
exe) and down (sleeping for a few seconds).
Recently, maybe a week ago, I noticed that the computer stopped running
scheduled tasks. It had hundreds of wscript.exe processes, I restarted the
machine and monitored it for the next days, and I saw that the CPU was
always up (wscript.exe 100%) executing the exe file or sleeping, and some
wscript.exe processes never end (no error messages).
I made a test vbs file that only sleeps, and it also uses 100% CPU.

What could have happened to this machine? Is a problem with wscript.exe or
with task scheduler?

Thanks in advance, best regards

Could you also post your sleep script example that takes 100% of the CPU time?

every10minutes.vbs

... initialize variables, load XML object ...
For Each objItem in objRootXML.childNodes
   ... create text file with xml content ...
    Set WshShell1 = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
    WshShell1.Run (strProgram)    <--- Async. call, it takes about two
seconds
    wscript.sleep 5000    <--- 100% CPU for 5 seconds
Next
<--- No more code here

This script, usually moved CPU to 100% (during the EXE call) and then back
to 2% the rest of the time of that 5 seconds wait (it had aprox. 3 seconds
of 2% CPU).
Now, the CPU is always at 100% until the program finishes, and when
scheduled (every 10 minutes) aprox. once of every three times, I see a
wscript.exe process that never ends consuming 100% CPU, or 2 wscript
processes each with 50% CPU, or three processes, 4, 5... or hundreds. If I
run the script manually, it always ends OK. I use the same user for
scheduled tasks and console.

This never happened before (the scripts have been running for more than 12
months), and I don't known what is happening.

My test script was as simple as this:

msgbox "Start"
wscript.sleep 8000   <--- 100% CPU
msgbox "End"

Tested on other servers, the CPU is always very low with this test.
Maybe the wscript.exe is corrupted and I need to reinstall a newer one?

Thanks

Hi Paco,

Try running the program synchronously, rather than asynchronously.

WshShell1.Run (strProgram),,1

Does that help?

Gordon Bell

Here is an example code:

every10minutes.vbs

... initialize variables, load XML object ...
For Each objItem in objRootXML.childNodes
   ... create text file with xml content ...
    Set WshShell1 = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
    WshShell1.Run (strProgram)    <--- Async. call, it takes about two
seconds
    wscript.sleep 5000    <--- 100% CPU for 5 seconds
Next
<--- No more code here

This script, usually moved CPU to 100% (during the EXE call) and then back
to 2% the rest of the time of that 5 seconds wait (it had aprox. 3 seconds
of 2% CPU).
Now, the CPU is always at 100% until the program finishes, and when
scheduled (every 10 minutes) aprox. once of every three times, I see a
wscript.exe process that never ends consuming 100% CPU, or 2 wscript
processes each with 50% CPU, or three processes, 4, 5... or hundreds. If I
run the script manually, it always ends OK. I use the same user for
scheduled tasks and console.

This never happened before (the scripts have been running for more than 12
months), and I don't known what is happening.

My test script was as simple as this:

msgbox "Start"
wscript.sleep 8000   <--- 100% CPU
msgbox "End"

Tested on other servers, the CPU is always very low with this test.
Maybe the wscript.exe is corrupted and I need to reinstall a newer one?

Thanks

Two things I would suggest for script execution that can at least "Band-Aid" the problem and may give us more information. ( I think Gordon's suggestion is a good one to try also if your next steps are not time-critical).

(1) Try "forcing" batch execution mode if you aren't already doing so by using the //B flag - e.g.,

cscript //B thescript.vbs

(2) Also specify a timeout for the script.  Since you re-run it every 10 minutes, you probably want to use a //T:600 or less switch.

You might indeed want to try reinstalling WSH; if you have not updated XML, IE, or WSH recently then there is nothing I can see to make the error suddenly appear other than a problem with the files that it uses.

Running synchronously didn't help
I have installed WSH 5.6 (I had 5.1) and sleep works fine on every script
except one, maybe wscript.exe was corrupted somehow.
There is only one script that still consumes 100% cpu, but seems another
issue.

Best regards