Do you need to set CPU affinities or priority classes and have those settings persist? This is one of the many automation capabilities of Process Lasso. Take control of your PC through your own manual rules, or let Process Lasso’s automated algorithms do it for you.
Process Lasso’s automation capabilities include:
Wildcards are accepted in most rules, along with Regular Expressions for more complex matching. Read more here.
Please remember that while Process Lasso offers a plethora of advanced tweaking capabilities, its ProBalance feature works out-of-the-box, so we not recommend the average home user tweak too much. It is easy to do more harm than good while trying to eek out a marginal performance gains. For the average home user, Process Lasso’s Performance Mode combined with ProBalance is about as good as you’ll get regarding performance and responsiveness. Obviously system administrators and power users have a different calculus.
Process Lasso has a robust ability to set default CPU affinities. The CPU affinity of a process is simply the set of logical cores that the process is granted access to. Remember, this inherently constrains a process, limiting it’s threads to acting only on a specific set of CPU cores. Custom CPU affinities can be used for a number of purposes, including a forced reduction in total CPU capacity able to be consumed by the target process.
Go deeper with more advanced rules, which we call the ‘Watchdog’. The possibilities are countless. You can get to this via ‘Options / Configure process watchdog …‘.
First, it is important to note that the CPU Limiter is not a magic bullet to reduce CPU utilization without consequence. CPU utilization occurs because an application or service is doing something. If you are able, you should address the cause of the CPU utilization, rather than arbitrarily limiting it. Our ProBalance technology does wonders for system responsiveness during high loads without actually reducing CPU use.
However, in some circumstances, it is desirable to reduce a process’s CPU use to achieve more fair access to system resources. This is common in Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environments, or when non-critical background processes are consuming too large a share of system resources. In those cases, the CPU Limiter is a great option.
The CPU Limiter can dynamically reduce the CPU use of running processes by temporarily constraining their CPU affinity. For instance, on a 4 CPU core system, constraining the CPU affinity by 1 core limits the total possible CPU utilization of that process to 75%.
The user creates rules telling the CPU Limiter which processes to act on, and when. When a process match exceeds a threshold over some period, it is limited for the configured duration. Like other rules in Process Lasso, process matches can include wildcards and user names.
The CPU cores removed from a process’s CPU affinity are selected randomly from the set of its original CPU affinity. Once the act-for duration elapses, the original CPU affinity is restored.
While you could accomplish a similar function with a combination of Watchdog rules, the CPU Limiter is easier to use. Using the Watchdog for the same effect would require two rules, one to constrain the CPU affinity when over threshold, and another to restore the original CPU affinity. Finally, the Watchdog rules are limited to statically defined CPU affinities.
The act-for duration can be set to 0 to indicate an indefinite change to a process’s CPU affinity.
Let’s say you have an issue with Chrome sometimes consuming all available CPU cycles, and you don’t want to set a static CPU affinity that restricts it from short bursts of 100% utilization. You might create a CPU Limiter rule such as:
chrome.exe, after 15 seconds over 30%, restrict by 2 cores for 30 seconds
If a specific user is problematic, you can append that user name to the process match:
chrome.exe:johnny
Wildcards are also supported in process and user names, such as:
fire*.exe:user*
If no user is specified, then any user matches.
The Instance Balancer allows you to indicate how CPU cores should be assigned to an application with multiple instances. You can evenly spread the instances across the CPU cores, or set a specific CPU core count for each instance. When there are more instances than allotted CPU cores, instances are ‘stacked’ in a round-robin manner. When the instance count of managed applications changes by new process creation or termination, a re-balance occurs.
Limit the number of instances an application can have.
Process Lasso Preventing PC Sleep
This will cause an automatic switch to ‘Gaming Mode’, now renamed ‘Performance Mode’. This is in the Workstation Edition only.
Process Lasso has a robust ability to set default priority settings for a process. This includes the CPU priority class, I/O level, and memory priority. The dialogs below emphasize this point, though these options are also easily accessible via the process context menu (right-click) within Process Lasso’s GUI.
Persistent I/O Priorities
