It seems that setting priority to low for some processes in Windows XP doesn't help. I'm talking about Incredibuild (a distributed build system), linking with visual studio, intellisense of visual studio, and windows update. Those all appear to use a lot of hard disk or memory access, and it appears that even if you set their priority to low, that priority is only for CPU usage, not HD access and memory. There may be only 5% CPU usage by e.g. the linker or incredibuild, and yet it takes 5 minutes for firefox to start up during that time, or for the visual studio GUI to respond. Are there any ways to tune these process priorities better even for other things than CPU cycles? It's really annoying... I care more about GUI response speed and startup time of small programs than the huge chunks of calculation.

I don't think you can do much in Windows XP. I/O priority was implemented in Windows Vista, though, so short of upgrading, I'm not sure what else you can do...

Quote: Original post by Lode
[...]that priority is only for CPU usage, not HD access and memory[...]

You are absolutely right. You can mitigate memory usage by adding more memory and harddisk usage by adding more harddisks (and making incredibuild only using one of them).

Quote: Original post by Rattenhirn
You are absolutely right. You can mitigate memory usage by adding more memory and harddisk usage by adding more harddisks (and making incredibuild only using one of them).

Actually, that's a good point. Use a separate disk for your builds than your system drive (i.e. separate physical disks). Then, I/O for your builds will not affect the I/O required to start up new applications.