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Performance: Should I assign processes to cores manually?
Hi
My question is related to processor affinity.
There's a feature well-hidden in the Task Manager on all version of Windows 7 (and even on Vista and XP I guess) that lets you select which programs can use which processor cores.
Normally this is something the OS and the programs do automatically but this option is like a manual ovveride button. You can decide manually for each process. For example I assigned firefox to core #2 and also flash player. I'm testing it to see if it puts off any system load. Of course this might slow down the particular process since basically I'm restricting it to run on one core instead of two, but running it on core number two frees up resources on core number one. Which means other programs can open up faster etc. A fair tradeoff for me, in some cases. In other cases it could be a bad thing since it could slow down a video encoding. Actually this feature in Task manager is temporary, it gets deleted during the next reboot. It doesn't remember nor does it apply these settings permamently, you need a third party program for that. But I definitely like this, the fact its temporary, because I can test my system risklessly, if it slows down I can reboot it and changes are reversed.
I'm sure many of you know about this feature, so I'm interested in your personal opinion: is this thing useful?
I just ordered a new four core AMD processor and I want to use it as efficiently as possible. I like watching videos on the Internet but I don't want flash player to take on all my four cores.
But I want video encoding to kick in on all four cores. Also I would restrict office apps onto one core since they aren't resourceful at all, they were fine for me in the old days when we had singlecore.
So I'm all ears for your opinions. Definitely if you have a quadcore CPU: do you do this?