Throwing the lasso at rogue applications

[terencecarson]

Hi all.
Few weeks ago I bought PL Pro license just few hours after installing it. Why? 'cos I finally found a resource manager for my humble 3.40 dual core home pc.
While the default settings I guess are ok to make the pc run smoother I knew that I had to customize something for my main purpose: prevent the system to become more or less unresponsive when some process start acting crazy.
And the first test came pretty soon: a video file completely stalled my player and the pc with it. PL icon became red and CPU usage was 100%. What I did was change the CPU affinity during restraint to two of my four virtual cores.
Re-playing the video the CPU usage was "only" 50% so I could easily stop the player and go on with my life.
But a more challenging test was on its way: my chess program. On analysis mode it eats up 100% of CPU though the pc keeps responding even without PL. Still, it can't be. It launches 4 instances of his process, one on priority level normal, the other three below normal.
Maybe this is the reasons why the CPU affinity limit didn't work: 4 processes using each 25% of CPU, I don't know. I tried everything: lowering the priority to idle during restraint, limiting the affinity to 1 virtual core etc., the CPU would invariably rocket to 100%.
Finally I changed I/O priority and that did the trick: "only" 77%. So to sum up this are my present probalance settings:


CPU when adjustment should begin: 55%
Ignore all foreground processes - unchecked
Ignore all processes not running at a normal priority class - unchecked
Lower to idle priority instead of below normal - unchecked
Exclude system services from restraint - unchecked
Change affinity during restraint - checked (CPUs 0-1 of four)
Only change CPU affinity, do not adjust priority - unchecked
Round robin CPU affinity selection: unchecked
Reduce CPU affinity by one randomly selected processor - unchecked
Disable probalance when pc is idle for - unchecked
Lower I/O priority during restraint: checked
Disable CPU core parking during restraint - unchecked

Now I have two questions:
1) Could these setting cause me any problem, especially considered that they act also on system processes (I HAVE to keep an eye on svchost)?
2) Is there any improvement I can make keeping in mind my main purpose?

I want to conclude by thanking Mr Collake for filling a gap in the pc world (and I sure tried various process explorers, monitors end so on).

P.S.: just to be clear, I know I can put a rule on a particular process, it's just not what i want here

[edkiefer]

Thanks for the input experience , as for your questions .
Generally we recommend using the default setup for a while so you can get to see the defaults and how your user experience is.

Now on your settings.
Normally I would recommend foreground processes being excluded as this is the app your focused on (you don't normally want to restrain what your working on especially with I/O).
Again I would normally recommend system processes/services to be ignored but I have tested it with on and I never had a issue with services.

One thing I would add is link high workload app (like chess app) to a power profile to get more out of CPU, you can use the Bitsum HP power profile or you could also you game mode to for foreground app.

Other that that it is hard to say100% what will work with each system when you start to micro manage processes , my comments are general use with avg system.

[terencecarson]

Thank you for replying edkiefer.
I've restrained system processes for a while using the default settings and I experienced no problems. I noticed that svchost.exe was tamed many times but i guess that letting it run free wouldn't hurt. It got me in trouble long time ago when in a couple of occasions completely stalled the pc. I could find out that in very specific circumstance it would start writing an insane amount of data and wouldn't let go till had finished. Avoided that situation ever since and everything went peachy. But now that I added CPU affinity and I/O priority to the restrain it's probably wiser to exclude the system processes.
As for game mode it's obvious that my configuration wouldn't work at all, but as I am a very occasional gamer I prefer to change temporarily the settings whenever I feel like having my a** kicked at chess or other pastimes.
Any further tip we'll be appreciated.

[edkiefer]

Yes, only thing I can add is be careful with I/O restraints , this is not a PL problem but a general one of OS.
In most cases it probably be best to let the I/O go as fast as possible ,simple because its the slowest thing in the system (compared to CPU, memory etc).

[terencecarson]

Got it. If there will be new developments I'll update the topic.