Windows 7 Lowering process priority and Affinity

zvit

Honorable Member
Joined
Nov 3, 2009
Did anyone ever find it useful to change a process priority? I never did.

When I encode full HD video in Encore, it takes a lot of CPU power and even if I watch an HD movie on KMplayer, it has a little stutter.

I tried lowering the Encore process priority and I also tried raising the KMplayer's process priority and I also tried un-checking some CPU's in the Encore process Affinity but it had no effect what so ever.

Is this ability to change process priority real or what?

Is there any other way to change Encore's process priority? I don't care if the Encore encoding takes longer, as long as I can do other things with the computer and have Encore use less processors or\and less CPU power. Thanks.
 
If changing priority and affinity for Encore and KMplayer gives you something positive and no issues, then fine. But generally, do not change a process priority for stabillity's sake. Manually or automatically with the help of a script, priorities can be changed to speed up a game or an application, which is more effective in a multitasking environment. Certain software (like AnyVideoConverter for example) even has an option to run itself in high priority, safer when software controlled.


I have tried "High" and "Realtime", it would give me a little boost but would also rarely cause freezes and even system hangs when I could do nothing but reset or power off. The overall effect is really different in each case.


Say you set a game priority to "Realtime". The game process is now running faster but not so are the rest of the resources that the game uses, such as drivers and windows api's which keep running in their usual priority anyway. There can be a little boost of course but with that there's also a higher risk of a system crash. You may want to experiment, but so you know what to expect in the worst case.


Prio - Priority Saver


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Process - how many CPU attention your sytem gives to a certain process.

Affinity - how many CPU cores/threads are assigned to a certain process. By default, any process has the affinity set to all cores available in the system.
 
Sure, it works well for me when I want to use all the cpu power I possibly can. I set it to high for when using AutoMKV or TMPGEnc. It makes my system very slow for everything else, but this is the intended result.

Like this, it can typically encode in 50 seconds what it would normally do in a minute, as a decent guess.
 
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