Set Affinity

[PP Mguire]

Looking for a program that will change the affinity of a program once and for all without needing to have it open and save profiles. Probably a lost cause, but worth a shot. Basically what I want to do is to permanently set cores to individual services and programs. I think by doing this I can eliminate any and all sluggishness on my system that would potentially crop up.

For instance, what I want to do is assign core 4 to Xfire, explorer.exe, all svshost processes, Creative processes, and Nvidia processes. I will then give Firefox core 3 all to its lonesome. Almost anything else that is to be ran can use cores 1 and 2 freely as well as 3 and 4 (for things that use all 4 like Supreme Commander, encoding, ect). Looking for a program to do this permanently without the need of an extra task running in the background or needing to assign cores to everything during every reboot.

If there is such a program or reg editor or something let me know.

[Blacksmith1]

what i use runs in the systray so all i can say is good luck. i've never heard of one that doesn't

[PP Mguire]

I've tried using 2, but they wont let me set for system services.

[Blacksmith1]

Hve you tried the right click in task manager? I don't know if it saves the settings for future runs , but it does allow you to tell processes which cores they can use. It can't hurt to try it.

[PP Mguire]

That's what made me think of the idea. As soon as you reboot you have to do it again though. I shut my computer off every night so was looking for an automated option.

[Dragon]

just curious why? if you needing to do that I say get a bigger CPU with more threads available.

[PP Mguire]

More threads wont help in this case. The more I can free up the first core the better because everything minus multi-threaded apps and games are generally processed on the first core unless told to do otherwise. If Firefox freezes up because of the latest flash update and it's on core 3 then my computer wont go lol derp on me for a few seconds. I manually changed the affinity to everything and separated between cores leaving core 1 free and it was very very snappy and smooth.

[Blacksmith1]

then run process lasso. my sys runs smooth as silk letting it do it's default thing and only setting affinity on my GPU folding apps. 2,3,4, for those. (actually 1,2,3, since it sees the first core as 0) yeah it runs in the systray but you'll never notice it as far as system resources go, unless you're running a very limited system.

[PP Mguire]

I'm willing to try it, but my PC OCD really kicks in when I have to run extra things in the background.

[Joshua_Mahr]

Cool I am not the only one with PC OCD! Yea!

[Blacksmith1]

I used to be one of those people that right clicked the the systray to shut stuff off, then went to task manager to kill eveything I didn't need. but since I got my 4 core and 4gb of mem. it really doesn't make a noticeable difference. I still kill any apple apps that i'm not using but that's just because.... and truth be told I do still pop the stuff in systray that doesn't need to run when I'm not using it.

[PP Mguire]

Ever since XP I have always customized my OS to use as little RAM as possible with the least amount of things running in the background. The reason I stopped using an AV is because of this as well, since I bettered my online habits. Right now I only have 3 things going and still probably using less than 1GB of RAM in an 8GB setup lol. I'm the kind of person who will disable printspool until I need it just to save a couple meg of RAM. This kind of fine system management and tweaking is how I can run all the latest games at max with only midrange hardware as Frag found out after trying to say that video was fake.

This is also the reason why I wanted to sort through things and assign independent unused cores for daily tasks so any hang or freeze up due to flash or something else wont be seen. I don't know about y'all, but after the 11 update flash has been freezing FF a lot. Because of this if it isn't assigned to another core besides 1 then it hangs my OS for a few seconds.

[Blacksmith1]

My system rarely hangs and then only when I'm pusshing it to the max. that's what process lasso is supposed to do for you. If something is affecting system respnsiveness then it lowers it's priority temporarily.