What is Process Lasso's 'ProBalance' technology?

Started by Jeremy Collake, September 29, 2008, 04:37:15 PM

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Jeremy Collake

ProBalance, which stands for Process Balance, is the name of our proprietary algorithm that temporarily lowers the priority of some background processes in an effort to keep your system responsive during high loads.

When your CPU is in high load, even for multi-core systems, the responsiveness of the foreground process (the one you are currently using) can be severely diminished. This is because the Windows scheduler doesn't give the foreground process high enough precedence over the background process(es) that are consuming so many CPU cycles. This is by design, so that Windows is completely fair to background processes and so the foreground process itself doesn't monopolize the CPU.

However, when it comes to the actual use of Windows on workstations, you find that background processes consistently interfere with the ability to use your computer. Sometimes this is due to an error occurring in a background process, or other times it is simply because there is such a high load on the CPU. On a single-CPU system a single thread running at normal priority can bring the computer to a near unrecoverable stall. You probably have experienced this before.. your mouse only moves once every second or so as the whole system grinds to a halt.

Process Lasso attempts to intelligently lower the priority of background processes when they may be interfering with system responsiveness. This doesn't really hurt background processes, as they still get a considerable amount of the available CPU time, but it helps the responsiveness of foreground processes tremendously. After all, usually it just takes a few CPU cycles to keep the foreground process responsive. Taking these from background processes, when necessary, is hardly detrimental to them. Process Lasso is designed to be minimally obtrusive, lowering priorities only when appropriate, and making sure that the background processes still perform just fine.
Software Engineer. Bitsum LLC.