Problem with file copying adversely affecting media/file sharing & WMC

[brucemellen]

Problem with file copying adversely affecting media/file sharing & WMC

WMC recording/playback and media/file sharing seems to work fine until I go to copy a file between drives, where one of those drives is currently using some of its i/o bandwidth to do media. The copy hogs the i/o bandwidth, doing nasty things to the real-time needs.

How do I permanently tell Win7 x64 to do all [explorer] copies at a lower CPU and i/o (explorer.exe & system) priority and/or elevate WMC CPU & i/o (ehshell.exe?) and file/media sharing priorities a bit?

The PC is up to date on patches/drivers and should be able to prioritize obvious applications…

 

[whs]

Right click on the process in Task Manager. There you can set the priority.

 

[brucemellen]

But that doesn’t fix the problem or symptoms. It only sets the CPU priority until the process goes away or the next reboot, and does not affect the i/o priority.

The i/o priority is the problem. Streaming thread i/o should have higher read/write priority than normal, and batch-like processes should have lower than normal. That should all be handled by the OS queue manager for each drive queue. The queue manager should inherit knowledge about the requesting thread, enough to put items in the queue in an appropriate order. There are a lot of published algorithms; IBM has done a lot of work over many years; I’ve heard Apple does it right. I just don’t know WhaT* Windows is doing and either how to set entries in the registry, change executable properties, or get MS engineers to change the source code and ship/publish an update. I know Win7 has at least partially implemented i/o priority. It shows up in Resource Monitor.

Win7 has to learn how to multitask – it ain’t that simple; can’t be simple, we will get in trouble, and MS needs to acknowledge design flaws and fix the troubles people encounter, rather than tell them not to multitask. MS needs to fix the social behavior of their embedded batch-like utilities such as copy and convert .wtv to .dvr-ms. It needs to fix their OS queuing to accommodate smooth streaming.