Is it a good idea to change Processor Scheduling to Background Services ?

[mdsflyer]

Hi there, a question for those of you who know more about this stuff than me (this would be most of you reading this thread!).

I have a dedicated HTPC which i have been tinkering with over the last few days to generally streamline its operation.

Lots of websites out there offering advice and i've done the usual switching off of unneeded services (automatic updates, indexing etc, etc,).

Whilst hunting around i came across the setting that i've titled this thread.

First click on the System icon in the Control Panel. Next, click on the Advanced tab. Then performance settings and again advanced. This brings up a page with the option to adjust the processor scheduling to give best performance for background services or programs. By default it is selected to programs but i am going to try the background services option given the nature of the whole new tv engine.

Is this a bad idea ? (I operate 1 PC as the server/client and 2 laptops as clients, i would be making this change on the server/client pc only)

Of course the proof will be in the pudding but i thought someone out there might also like to try and others may already know the effect.



Cheers
m

[geov]

Hi

I have tried the same thing and found that the TV3 Server had no visible improvement, but that MP navigation became slower.

Let me know what you find...

Cheers
GeoV

[corvy]

I would not enable background service priority as you use the GUI on this computer. If this was a dedicated server or dedicated tvserver with no head (no gui frontend) then it could be enabled.

This is a setting not normally used on a client OS, mainly for servers.

[scoop]

@corvy:
Not quite true. I tend to use the "background services" option on systems which for example require low-latency audio. Drivers are treated as background services as well and in some situations you'd like to give more performance to these rather than to your desktop applications. This is to avoid slight stutters in audio on such systems when for example a window is dragged around while playing back or recording multiple tracks.

[mdsflyer]

Thanks for the input, been running this way this evening and nothing untoward has happened. Most likely due to some excellent work with the latest svn's and stability, but i'm going to stick with it as i haven't seen any drawbacks like slow gui . . . . .yet!

Cheers
m

[corvy]

Not quite true. I tend to use the "background services" option on systems which for example require low-latency audio. Drivers are treated as background services as well and in some situations you'd like to give more performance to these rather than to your desktop applications. This is to avoid slight stutters in audio on such systems when for example a window is dragged around while playing back or recording multiple tracks.

This is true, and it can be used for this purpose. But imho I think it should not normally be used for computers that server desktop programs.

mdsflyer: great that it works for you