When do you juggle process priorities?

[Coldblackice]

In general, regarding the Windows 7+ realm, when do (or would) you juggle a particular process' CPU (and/or I/O) priority?

My gut feeling is that it's sort of an irrelevant or unneeded layover function from past OS eras, and that it's almost always best to let the OS handle prioritizing.

But in your experiences, are there times when you manually adjust a process' priority, be it CPU priority or I/O priority(ies)?

 

[Surly73]

But in your experiences, are there times when you manually adjust a process' priority, be it CPU priority or I/O priority(ies)?

The only time I touch it is if I'm doing large file compressions (like huge 7zipped backups) or video encoding (like 6-12 CPU hours rendering an AVCHD disc). I make sure that the processes are set to lower than normal so the system stays responsive. Generally I've found that the apps themselves have those settings, I don't need to do it from process explorer or other tools.

 

[bigdogchris]

There's an application called Process Lasso that allows you to automatically set process priority and what CPU core it's on.

 

[Dogs]

The scheduler already does a satisfactory job, as far as I'm concerned. Applications which need more priority generally have the ability to obtain that, and things like multimedia playback are allocated larger time slices by the scheduler as of Windows Vista.

Messing with the scheduler priority does seem like an 'old' thing now, anyways. It used to be that things like interrupts were counted against the currently running process, so it was possible if doing something with lots of I/O in parallel with something else where 'real time' performance was important that you could get undesirable scheduling. That's been greatly improved in modern operating systems.

 

[Snowknight26]

The only time I touch it is if I'm doing large file compressions (like huge 7zipped backups) or video encoding (like 6-12 CPU hours rendering an AVCHD disc).

That's essentially the only time I change priorities. As encoding in the background while gaming reduces framerates severely, I usually set the encoder's priority to low to lessen the performance impact.

 

[FnordMan]

on the whole, I don't. The only time I do is with 7-zip and large compression operations. (hit the "background" button)
Any other major cpu bound operation I do that can run in the background is automatic. (handbrake, for example automatically sets it to low)

 

[REDYOUCH]

It's almost 2014. Manually changing process priority is a thing of the past.

 

[Deleted member 245375]

One word: Prio

 

[x509]

It's almost 2014. Manually changing process priority is a thing of the past.

Uh, don't generalize. If I'm doing some heavy process and running Skype at the same time, I need to put Skype on a higher priority, or call quality goes to crap.

 

[Sovereign]

The only time I touch it is if I'm doing large file compressions (like huge 7zipped backups) or video encoding (like 6-12 CPU hours rendering an AVCHD disc). I make sure that the processes are set to lower than normal so the system stays responsive. Generally I've found that the apps themselves have those settings, I don't need to do it from process explorer or other tools.

This is me. If I tell Rhino 3D to chew on something (read: big render), I drop its process back to Below Normal or else all four (eight HT) cores are going to be busy and everything else will be molasses.

 

[devil22]

I use Process Lasso as well, to give MPC-HC and Foobar real-time cpu and high I/o priorities. They have their own limited priority options, but media playback is most important to me so I want to make sure nothing ever skips/stutters so I jack it up to max. I get good results I believe, at normal priorities, 100% CPU usage will cause MPC-HC playback of blu-rays to stutter, setting MPC-HC to real-time results in no stutter at all with 100% CPU usage.