Hi folks,
I love your app, have been using it for years. I also recently purchased a license to support you.
A feature I wish existed, and I think many/majority would also use, is having the ability to create custom performance profiles that can be triggered to enable when a specific process runs.
What do I mean by profile?
At the most simple level, for the below settings to be stored under a profile:
- CPU priority
- CPU sets / affinity
Why would this be useful?
Your tool provides amazing granular control, but the current design of choosing "current" or "always" renders a lot of the functionality inaccessible.
When touching any process, choosing "current" means you will have to manually change it every time you need to replicate that effect.
Choosing "always" means you will have to live with any negative consequences of that change until you change it back.
Having a third option (a profile) that can combine as many of those tweaks as you want, that can be toggled under certain conditions would give a lot of power to the user to maximize the benefit from using process lasso.
Use case example:
- Let's say as a user you want to optimize your system for some task, call it X.
- After using process lasso, you realize for example your browser and a few background services affects X's performance
- So you use process lasso to lower the CPU priority of your browser and those background services. Or you force these processes to run on a separate core through CPU sets. Problem solved for X.
- Now at a later time, you're no longer running X. You use your browser and realize- your browser is now laggy and stuttering.
- Or, you start a benchmark and wonder: "why are my fans not ramping up?" then realize "oh, it's because I changed fan control software affinity / priority".
The choice you're left with is: go back and manually change all those settings back, and need to repeatedly change them every time.
Or, choose to give up best conditions for one thing or the other. Which somewhat defeats the purpose.
tldr; alot of the available settings are good knobs to change if and only if under certain contexts. Hence, they feel unusable without the ability to control when they're on/off in a grouped manner outside of "now" or "always". For this reason alone, I would imagine alot of the end users never touch or interact with those controls.
I hope that makes sense.
I like the concept and we have been working towards that.
The Named Configuration Profiles and Config Profile Switcher (https://bitsum.com/processlasso-docs/#config-profile-switcher) is meant to serve the purpose you describe, but I'll admit it is a bit obtuse to use. It will basically apply a specific profile (CPU affinity/sets rules, etc...) when a process is run. The caveat is that any other profile will need rules to undo whatever actions the previous profile set. So, if one a "Gaming" profile sets a process priority to Above Normal, any other profile (e.g. "General Use") will need to explicitly have a rule to set that process's priority to Normal.
You can find this under the "File > Config Profile" menu.
The next release of Process Lasso will add the named config profiles to the tray menu, which will help to expose this existing functionality and make it more accessible. From there, we'll continue to work towards the goals you outline.
UPDATE: The config profile submenu has been added to the tray menu as of v16.0.3.9 BETA.
Thanks for the feedback and support!