how do I assign system resources?

[op3studios]

greetings from Alaska,

I'm beating a faithful old horse, and need to assign a minimum amount of dedicated cpu to Foobar audio player.

browsers especially interfere with Foobar, rudely busting in mid song causing drop out in the playback stream.

I'm running Process Lasso, and can see it happening.
so I want to assign dedicated cpu time for Foobar.
thanks,

Jim

 

[Lemur]

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/83632-processor-affinity-set-applications.html

and

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/83361-priority-level-set-applications-processes.html

and

Assign a Program or Process to a Specific CPU running on Windows 7

 

[op3studios]

charmed,
thx

 

[cluberti]

You can also increase the priority of a specific process as well via a right-click on it in Task Manager to above normal or high (I would never recommend realtime, as that can have disastrous consequences if your newly-increased priority process decides to get active enough to usurp other system processes running at realtime), which (in most cases) gives the threads running in that process a higher priority over lower-priority running processes, which means threads at higher priority won't be swapped out for lower-priority threads as often (giving a foreground running thread more time to execute). You can also increase foreground thread priority scheduling (giving a thread a longer default quantum time) by changing the Win32PrioritySeparation value (still valid on Win7, even though the article is for XP) to 0x26 or 0x15 - I would not recommend 0x16 on a busy machine, as you can make background apps take much longer to run with such an aggressive setting. Testing each different setting is something you can do if you're a fiddler and don't mind testing things out . Giving a thread a longer quantum means the thread stays on the processor for more CPU cycles before Windows starts looking to swap it out, also giving a thread more time to execute.

Mixing these two can make foreground processes feel more like real-time applications, at the expense of making things running as background and/or lower-priority take longer to execute. Since they're in the background, though, their quick execution probably isn't that big a deal if the system isn't otherwise loaded down with actively running applications.

 

[logicearth]

Course if Foobar actually took advantage of the new media APIs introduced in Windows Vista it would not have this problem. What I mean is... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Class_Scheduler_Service

 

[cluberti]

Lemur is also correct, setting affinity isn't a bad idea, although if you're not careful you could choose a busy CPU and by bypassing the kernel's scheduler, you could end up with worse performance. As a rule, though, it is usually best not to pick the last CPU in a multi-CPU system. You can read Windows Internals if you want nitty-gritty as to why, but suffice to say on a busy system the last processor is usually the busiest CPU on the system due to how the scheduler works. It isn't as bad on Win7 as it was on XP due to User Mode Scheduling changes, but it still exists as a minor issue on busy boxes.

If you could at all avoid foobar and follow logic's advice on a Vista-compatible media player that would avoid the problems, that would also be good, but I'm assuming there's some logical reason you're sticking with foobar?