What's the deal with processor priority in XP?

[pyrate83]

What does it mean to set a higher/lower than normal process priority in windows XP? Does it affect anything or has anyone even screwed with this yet?

[i_am_dave]

I mess with it all the time.
Essentially, the priority is how you tell XP how important an application is and how much time it should allot to the application.
The highest priority (Realtime) should never be used since you are telling XP to give the application a higher priority than the operating system.

The lowest (idle time) tells XP to give your application some time only when nothing else is going on.

Normal priority is where most applications run.

For more reading, I invite you to go to the Microsoft website.

[freak_in_cage_10k]

good explanation dave, just thought i would add 1 more thingt though!

This application of this priority setting can be very handy! For instance, lets say you are encoding a video, which is taking all your spare resources. but not you want to listen to some music and surf the internet at the same time- normally the music would stutter along, and opening internet windows etc would also take forever, HOWEVER, with XPs resourse management, you could put the encoding program to "low cpu priority" and put the music to "above normal"- this would allow the music to play without stuttering, your encoding speed would not decreasemuch because surfing the net and listening to music dont use your pc much, but i find it a very useful function!!

you could also be encoding a movie, and watching a dvd at the same time! simply putting the encoding on low priority and the video on above normal should result in perfect playback!!

[Greg12]

So could you decrease encoding time by raising the priority.

[i_am_dave]

So could you decrease encoding time by raising the priority.

Only if you had other tasks running that were requesting CPU time. If your encoding task were running at normal, it would probably consume 98-99% of the CPU time anyway.

Lately, I will always keep a couple of TMPGEnc tasks running at idle priority. This allows me to do other things at the same time, kind of a pipeline operation.

For example, I will sometimes:

1) Be burning a DVD for project 1(Normal priority, but I/O bound task)
2) Be encoding project 2 files (multiples with TMPGEnc in idle priority)
3) Capturing for project 3(normal priority, but enough CPU time left so that I don't drop frames)

Again, just a couple of words of advice:
1) Don't messa around with priorities of system tasks unless you know exactly what you are doing
2) Don't assign Realtime to any of your applications unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Other than that, just play around with it and see what happens.

Good luck!