FR: Per process limits, priority stepping & more...

[wawa]

Hi,

I'm a noob both in priority management and p-lasso. Doing try-outs with them, I witnessed p-lasso successfully outstands among so-called priority managers. So thank you for your hard work ;-)...

I mainly use p-lasso for predefined load-time priorities for programs that don't handle their priorities although they need to like background programs, hashers, burners, encoders & so on... After using it for the past few weeks, I accumulated some questions/features to ask;

- Is there a way to catch/set windows priorities of a single program? Meaning; some programs while having single entrance in p-lasso/task manager can have multiple windows floating with different priorities. I think this has something to do with "threads" yet I'm just a noob. While trying out, the "power-menu" priority manager seems to handle these successfully...

- Mentioned above, I'd like to ask if you can consider to add the "power-menu"->any program's main icon menu->set priority in addition to centralized priority manager. It seemed somewhat more practical since I choose to not run p-lasso all the time but the p-governor in the background...
[Process Lasso with Power Menu]

- Can there be per-process balance-boost (=downscaling and upscaling respectively I believe) stepping limits? Explaining with ex.: I like my DVD burning and DVB programs to have "high" priority (uplimit) since they deal with the hardware yet their priorities can be lowered first to "above normal" and then to "normal" (downlimit) as the p-lasso manages overall programs And I like my Archivers, Encoders, Duplicate Checkers and Checksum Verifiers to start with "normal" and go down first to "below normal" and then to "idle" as p-lasso detects they consume most of the CPU time. Perhaps being a noob I couldn't find a way in p-lasso to manage per-process priority limits but automated general balancing...

- Being using the default settings for "probalance" and others, I have a problem in particular with the program "DVB Dream". I don't know why but if this semi-unstable program does consume 100% CPU time for minutes due some reason (simply hangs system), even Process Lasso can't help me like I expected by lowering its priority so that it can be "killed" until I "hard reset" my XP system. The program starts at "high" and can be managed by p-lasso (not excluded from any). If you can try or pinpoint about what's wrong, I'd really appreciate the suggestions...

I think that's all I got to say up until now. Thanks for reading and forgiving the misconceptions of a noob...

Bye...

[Jeremy Collake]

- Is there a way to catch/set windows priorities of a single program? Meaning; some programs while having single entrance in p-lasso/task manager can have multiple windows floating with different priorities. I think this has something to do with "threads" yet I'm just a noob. While trying out, the "power-menu" priority manager seems to handle these successfully...

There is probably one actual process instance behind all those Windows. Web browsers do this, for instance. For each Window, the primary message handling thread will have its own priority. Process Lasso doesn't bother with managing individual thread priorities, except in the case of foreground boosting. It is important to note that when the priority class of the process changes, ALL its threads get adjusted in their effective priority. So, when Process Lasso takes action on the process that owns all those Windows, the threads will be acted upon too. Tweaking individual thread priorities isn't something I recommend, as often times processes have prioritized their own threads, and it is important to keep the relative priorities of the threads static (meaning its ok if all threads are adjusted up or down, but not individual threads, because their ordering then changes).

- Mentioned above, I'd like to ask if you can consider to add the "power-menu"->any program's main icon menu->set priority in addition to centralized priority manager. It seemed somewhat more practical since I choose to not run p-lasso all the time but the p-governor in the background...

Yea, that is already on my todo list. I'll try to get to it pretty soon.

- Can there be per-process balance-boost (=downscaling and upscaling respectively I believe) stepping limits? Explaining with ex.: I like my DVD burning and DVB programs to have "high" priority (uplimit) since they deal with the hardware yet their priorities can be lowered first to "above normal" and then to "normal" (downlimit) as the p-lasso manages overall programs And I like my Archivers, Encoders, Duplicate Checkers and Checksum Verifiers to start with "normal" and go down first to "below normal" and then to "idle" as p-lasso detects they consume most of the CPU time. Perhaps being a noob I couldn't find a way in p-lasso to manage per-process priority limits but automated general balancing...

Hmm, that's not a bad idea.. I'll have to spend some time considering such a stepping of the priority class. That may work out well, it is on my radar now .

- Being using the default settings for "probalance" and others, I have a problem in particular with the program "DVB Dream". I don't know why but if this semi-unstable program does consume 100% CPU time for minutes due some reason (simply hangs system), even Process Lasso can't help me like I expected by lowering its priority so that it can be "killed" until I "hard reset" my XP system. The program starts at "high" and can be managed by p-lasso (not excluded from any). If you can try or pinpoint about what's wrong, I'd really appreciate the suggestions...

By default, Process Lasso doesn't mess with programs that have a non-normal priority class. So, you just need to change the toggle (menu):

Options / ProBalance Settings / Exclude Processes of Non-Normal Priority