Set process priority to High: Dangerous?

I have read that setting something to realtime is a big no-no, so I am not going to do that. But I do have an application that I need to make sure always has the highest priority on my system as it is critical for the rest of the applications I am running. Is there any danger in setting the priority to high, which is one level below realtime?

Also, how would I be able to do this by changing the shortcut target? What is the command?

Solution 1:

Realtime isn't necessarily a "no-no". It just might starve other processes out of CPU cycles. Some applications can't handle that. Its something you would have to experiment with.

High should be less of a problem. However, you still need to monitor your system to see if all the applications are behaving well.

Here is how to change the process via command line, which you can put into a shortcut:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/191771

Solution 2:

I would say it depends. If you only have one core/CPU on your computer, and it's a CPU-intensive task, I wouldn't set it to realtime. High might be okay, but that needs experimenting.

If you have multiple cores, and the process is single threaded: go ahead, set it however you want. Your other cores will still be free, even when one core is at 100% load the whole time.

If you have multiple cores and the process is multi threaded: it will depend if all threads will have 100% load. Some programs have a 'manager' thread that dispatches work to other threads but doesn't do a lot of processing itself. That would leave one core nearly free and thus allow for high or real-time priority.

Other programs will try to take in all cores. In this case high might be fine, but it needs experimenting.

Even others will only take a particular number of cores and might not use all cores available. In this case high or real-time priority should be fine.

Unless you're on a single core, go ahead, experiment. Most of the time it won't hurt to set it to high or even real-time. You can set the affinity of a process (how many cores it can use) in task manager as well. This way you can better balance the load on your CPU. It can also help keep temperatures and power consumption down, etc.