Why does CPU usage spike to 100% when opening Task Manager?

If you’ve ever launched Task Manager only to watch your CPU usage hit 100% and stay there, you may have wondered why this sudden mystery spike in system resource usage occurs. After all, Task Manager is a lightweight program that you can run with little impact on system performance on most machines. In this post, we will explain the concept.

CPU usage spikes to 100% when opening Task Manager

The root of the issue lies in a basic misunderstanding of how Task Manager actually works.

When you launch Task Manager, it immediately begins collecting information on what processes are running, which ones are taking up the most system resources, and what resources they’re using. While Task Manager is collecting this information, the CPU usage spike you see is Task Manager compiling that data. Once it’s done, Task Manager presents all that data to you in a tabular format.

The confusion is even worse when you are monitoring CPU usage for different processes. The solution is to open Task Manager first so that it can begin monitoring CPU usage as soon as it begins running, instead of after it has already started to tax your CPU.

That said, you can also choose to slow down the Task Manager update speed to skip this annoying problem. Since the update will be slow, the CPU usage spike will come at a later point.

Windows Task Manager offers a quick and easy way to see exactly what programs are running on your computer and how much processor and memory they are currently using. However, if you are not happy with it, you can check out some alternative Task Manager tools that can help you track resource usage.

I hope the post was able to explain the reason for the sudden CPU spike when the Task Manager is launched.