Changing WCG related Software Priority

The WCG related software runs at a very low priority. That is, it defers to all other programs that are running. It does this so that your computer interacts with you just the way it did prior to you adding the WCG software.

The WCG related software is designed to kind of "melt into the background" and soak up all the left-over processor time. This is why you can run it all the time your computer is running and not even notice that it is there.

Now if you artificially raise the priority of the software, that means that it will run to the exclusion of other pieces of code that need to run to do other things.

Sometimes these other pieces of code do things like

  • monitor and accept data coming in off the network
  • monitor and accept keystrokes from the keyboard
  • move the mouse pointer on the screen in relation to the physical movement of the mouse
  • make sure that the data from the last write statement to the disk actually gets written

You get the picture. There are lots of processes on your computer as you can see by using the alt-ctrl-del and these processes are generally necessary for the smooth and reliable operation of the computer. If you raise the priority of the WCG software above the priority of these, you are likely to cause yourself problems and possibly make your computer unstable.

If you do not raise it that high but do raise it higher than your browser or email package or whatever, these programs will get "sluggish" and unpleasant to use.

It is for these and other reasons that the WCG people and others that understand operating systems do not recommend changing the priority of the WCG related software. Also, the Windows Operating System hides some important functions to prevent problems. Changing the priority of a Windows application program achieves a lot less than you would think unless you use special utilities.

From Rick Alther (WCG Application Developer): Using the Task Manager to change the priority of Rosetta has no effect unless you change it to "Real Time", at which point your system will likely become unresponsive, so don't do that.

Changing Rosetta to any other priority class has zero effect. It will still have a final priority of 1 (the lowest on the system). To understand why that is, you have to understand how Windows handles priorities. The Task Manager lets you change the priority class of a process, but not it's relative priority within a class, which is where the final priority is derived from.

This explains why when you change Rosetta to "Normal" priority, you still notice no difference on your system...because there is no difference.

Changing priority is pretty much a moot point anyway. It will use all available CPU power that isn't currently being used by anything else. i.e. it's not supposed to interfere with normal usage of the machine. If you're not doing anything with it at the time, it's getting all your CPU.

To sum up: Changing the priority of Rosetta to "Below/Normal', "Normal", "Above/Normal", or "High" will have no effect in changing the final priority. Changing it to "Realtime" will, but you'll end up with an unresponsive system.

That having been said, you could have other problems:

It is possible that you can have some other processes running on your computer that soak up a lot of time and keep the processor busy so that the WCG software does not get much, if any, time.

In this case, you need to look at what those processes are and decide if they are necessary or even desirable. Often one finds that there are Trojans or "Adware" processes in one's machine that are causing such behavior. Any computer connected to the Internet needs 3 types of security programs for protection:

The examples given are all free for personal use, but there are many alternatives available; this is not necessarily an endorsement of them to the exclusion of the myriad other programs of a similar nature.

Scan your computer frequently, but be aware that some anti-virus and security programs (particularly large security suites) can themselves slow down your computer. Keep an eye out for slow-downs when your virus scanner is running, and get advice on how to make the process more unobstrusive.

The bottom line in all this is that if you have to raise the priority of the WCG software in order to get it to make progress, you probably have other problems on the computer that you need to address. Raising the priority of the WCG may temporarily mask the problem but it will not cure it and is likely to cause problems ranging from minor irritations to major instability and data integrity problems.