I’ve been experimenting a lot lately with Apophysis for fractal generation, and one thing that bugs me is that when actually running a render, the program still runs at normal priority. Which means that even on a very fast dual core Core2 processor, my system just drags.

It’s easy enough to remedy; just use taskman to set the Apophysis Process to below normal priority. The render still runs full speed if you aren’t doing anything else on the machine, but it takes a backseat to anything else going on.

I’ve used this trick before for many purposes (Terragen, anyone!), and even used it within a Service process I wrote once. The service was fully multithreaded, and each thread adjusted it’s priority based on what it was doing.

Well, the frustration got a little much last night so I started looking for something that would automatically recognize processes as they come online and adjust their priority based on predefined settings.

Look no further, Process Priority Optimizerto the rescue. It’s a small utility that runs in the tray (what doesn’t anymore 😉 ). You can set the preferred priority if a process, save, and then, if that process loads up again, it’s priority is automatically adjusted.

UPDATE:

Even better, Ralf pointed me to a program called ProcessTamer. It looks even better than Process Priority Optimizer, because it will automatically adjust the priority of processes that are running hot, no preconfiguration necessary. The latest version also supports specific configurations for particular applications, which is what the Optimizer will do While.

I’m all for apps that handle things transparently (unless, of course, I want to configure it, I’m fickle that way <g>) , so my money’s on ProcessTamer now!

Just don’t go setting arbitrary processes to real time! You have been warned<g>