Multiple instances or processes of visual studio code in task manager for single application window

This behavior is by Design and is documented in the comments in the Github Issues #5856, #8006 and #20856

Summary from the comments mentioned in the Links

This behavior is a consequence of both how vscode was designed and the fact that it's build on Chromium/Electron. The number of processes should not really matter from an end user perspective, it's the amount of work each process does and the communication between them that are important.

By design, the UI framework we use is multi process by itself and then we have 1 process for extensions (per window), one process for file watching (per window) and 1 process for search. We also have 1 shared process for updates.

Using a Tool like Process Explorer, You can get more details about the Process. Only one of the Process code.exe would have the parent as explorer.exe which denotes the Main Process which spawned other Children Processes. Following is a screenshot of how the Main code.exe properties appears using the Tool Process Explorer.

Additionally, a quick glance at the command line arguments for each of the Children code.exe process would provide more useful information as to what each process is supposed to do. For e.g. one of the Child process code.exe seems to be an error Reporting Process for crashes.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe" --reporter-url=https://ticinocrashreporter.azurewebsites.net/crash --application-name=VSCode "--crashes-directory=..\AppData\Local\Temp\VSCode Crashes" --v=1

Well I too just figured out that issue in my task manager. My case it is 6 instances. It was a lot more previously but once I cleared the recent project list in File > Open Recent, the number came down to 6.

Now the mystery of 6 was also resolved. The extra instances in task manager are used for the 'Extensions', 'Code editor' etc. windows / views inside VS Code.

You can verify this by killing one by one other instances in the task manager, as you do that the VS Code will start showing error and will complain about the instances that we are killing in task manager.

Hope it helps.