The Case of the Mysterious Presentation Font Cache CPU Hog
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September 14th, 2011 written by Sandro Villinger in Myth buster
Your PC worked perfectly fine the other day, but suddenly, it’s acting up. Performance went down, CPU activity increased, and your laptop’s or desktop’s fan is going wild—there’s clearly some resource hog affecting your system.
If our tuning tips didn’t resolve your situation, you might want to look at Windows Task Manager (hit CTRL+SHIFT+ESC at the same time). Over the past few months, I’ve heard that PresentationFontCache.exe is known to run amok and consume 50% of your processor’s resources. And, it actually seems to be a rather common problem. If this is happening on your system, we have the right fixes for you!
PresentationFontCache.exe is running constantly at 50% CPU usage—it's time to put a stop to this
What is Presentation Font Cache?
The Presentation Font Cache is part of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) feature, which allows programmers to develop graphically richer applications. It’s part of the .NET Framework (3.0, 3.5, 3.5 SP1 and 4.0), which, in turn, is part of Windows Vista (3.0) and Windows 7 (3.5).
Some of your installed applications may require WPF and make use of the Presentation Font Cache. This service loads font glyph information into memory and helps share these fonts with all of the installed WPF applications. As such, applications that use the WPF framework start a bit quicker, and font pickers (such as this one) might see a slight performance increase.
By default, this service is set to manual, so it won’t launch automatically and cause performance improvements (in non-WPF applications) or any problems. However, once you use a WPF program, this service will start and—in some cases—set to start automatically when Windows launches!
Why is it burning my CPU?
The Presentation Font Cache loads all fonts into its font cache (which is stored on your hard disk, but more on that later). However, at some point, this cache may become corrupted and unreadable due to a specific font. Then, the Presentation Font Cache will start to become unresponsive and get caught in a “I try to launch, but I’m stuck, so I will try it again” loop. That’s what causes the incredibly high CPU usage, and what may even result in a sudden shutdown due to overheating. Luckily, there are a few solutions to this problem!
Solution #1: Delete the font cache file
The font cache is located under the following folder: %windir%\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local. Simply hold down the WIN key on your keyboard and press “R”. Then, enter the path above and click “OK”. Delete all the “FontCache…dat” files you find, such as “FontCache-System.dat” or “FontCache3.0.0.0.dat”.
This will cause the WPF font cache to rebuild itself. However, if the problem persists, you might need to shut down the WPF font cache permanently.
Solution #2: Shutting down the WPF font cache
If all else fails, you have no choice but to disable the font cache. This may cause a slight slowdown when loading applications that heavily rely on fonts or offer a font picker (which loads hundreds or even thousands of your installed fonts). But, it’s a lot less painful then working under 50% CPU stress and hearing a fan working on overdrive. So how do you get rid of WPF font cache? It’s simple—go to “Control Panel”, and click on “System and Security”, “Administrative Tools” and “Services”. Scroll all of the way down until you see “Windows Presentation Foundation Font Cache”. Double-click on this entry, and select “Disabled” from the “Startup type” list.
That’s it! Click on “OK”, and reboot your system. You may encounter some slight delays in your WPF applications, but at least your PC will be running at full speed again.
We hope that this blog post solved your problem—if not, leave us a comment below, and we’ll try to figure out the issue!
October 2, 2011 at 4:57 am
Wow, thanks for this. Solved my problem, again thanks.
October 3, 2011 at 11:06 am
Great information and solved the very frustrating problem. Finally my Lenovo W500 is operating at full speed again!!!! Thank you so much.
November 13, 2011 at 7:41 am
I concur with this article! The info was spot on to what it is, how it affects your computer, and how to fix it. Thank god the first opinion was a success b/c the second, even though it would of worked, would of mine me sad a little. Once again great article!
December 17, 2011 at 1:54 am
Thanks a lot dude…. May God bless you !!!
January 18, 2012 at 7:05 pm
Excelente información
February 17, 2012 at 5:28 pm
Does WmiPrvSE have anything to do with WPF? It’s another power hog that restarts when you end process. Searching the net, this one appears to be similiarly troublesome
February 20, 2012 at 5:26 am
Holaa muchas gracias la verdad q ya no sabia q hacer pensaba q realmente era un problema del hardware hasta hace un mes q detecte en el monitor de recursos el problema y q bueno haberme topado con esta pagina y con esta información, me sirvio mucho, aun no reinicio el sistema pero estoy seguro q me servira, aun no se cuales serán los efectos negativos pero espero no sean tan graves y el sistema y las aplicaciones puedan funcionar normalmente. gracias
February 23, 2012 at 11:32 am
Hi rudolf,
can you post your question/comment in english?
Would appreciate it!
Thanks,
Sandro
March 9, 2012 at 4:36 pm
Thanks for your help
Its nice to have my battery life back again
May 29, 2012 at 6:26 pm
you are my hero
thanks
June 7, 2012 at 4:18 pm
Hey. When I copy the pathway and paste in the (Windows+R), I get a message that the pathway is invalid. I think the problem is that there’s no Service Profiles folder in the Windows folder. I’m running XP. Is there an alternate pathway for Windows XP? Thanks.
June 7, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Okay, I found the folder, here is the path: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation.
But When I open the folder and subfolders, I don’t see anything like the files to be deleted. Once inside the folder, where do I look for those files?
June 21, 2012 at 6:20 am
God Bless you. Excellent information. tried many other sites with vague comments. Thanks!
July 13, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Thanks! This solution brought my laptop back down to almost 0% CPU at idle, instead of 25-50% and a very annoying fan and way too hot laptop.
Even after disabling the Font Cache I still had to shut down the process manually… but it hasn’t come back!
September 3, 2012 at 2:56 pm
THANK YOU VERY MUCH IT HELP ME VERY WELL
October 20, 2012 at 7:09 pm
thanks a lot
October 21, 2012 at 5:02 pm
the solution still helps me even a year later…. THANK YOU
November 6, 2012 at 9:36 am
Great Info.. that actually solved my problem..
December 2, 2012 at 4:47 pm
I am using Vista. When Task Manager shows a presentationfontcache process running but it’s not showing up on my list of services under administrative tools. PLEASE HELP! I want to disable it permanently!
December 29, 2012 at 5:40 pm
Thank you for the information.
I was not able to open the file by your instructions, but I was able to find it under control panel, admin tools, services and then found windows presentation font cache. Then I disabled it. So far so good.
thank you again
January 24, 2013 at 3:02 pm
Thank you very much.
Muchas gracias.
February 20, 2013 at 4:30 pm
Thanks, this big piggie was very difficult to find. It turned my dual-core pentium IV into a 386. And it’s not even a virus, so 3 (three!) antimalware programs obviously didn’t find it. You are a godsend.
March 16, 2013 at 6:40 pm
in Windows XP the path to FontCache file is
/Documents and Settings/LocalServices/…
April 5, 2013 at 10:13 pm
I cannot stop staring at my Task Manager!! I cannot remember the last time the CPU usage was running under 5%… Thank you for sharing this wonderful information!
April 12, 2013 at 9:36 am
And i was assuming its due to the clogged heat sink..
Thank you for this Holy Grail..
April 20, 2013 at 4:41 pm
Thank you for your Support and detailed description.
It was very helpful.
Does Microsoft bring a Bug fix? Perhaps you know it.
Best regards
Peter
April 28, 2013 at 10:41 am
Thank you very much. This resolved my problem.
My laptop kept shutting down after every few minutes. I realized it was due to over heating but was not sure what was the cause of the sudden excess heat. I checked my task manager, the CUP usage graph showed 30% but I did not find any process that was having a very high CPU usage. That was until I clicked ‘show processes from all users’. Once I selected that option, I found that PresentationFontCache.exe was the culprit
May 15, 2013 at 12:13 am
My PC running Windows 7, Service Pack 1 has been sluggish lately – yesterday it simply refused to launch Windows Media Centre.
Task Mgr showed 100 per cent CPU (dual-core Athlon)utilisation!
I poked around a bit and found that the bulk of this use (50+ per cent)was due to some .exe part of Font Cache 3.0.0.0 – I stopped it and today CPU utilisation was down to between 1 and 4 pc at idle!
Came across your blog this morning and will delete the cache first, then see what gives…
Thanks for the info!