Priority - Programs vs. Background Services

This is totally unscientific, i'm just throwing it out there in case anyone who knows more about this can elaborate.

Sonar X1 had run crash-free for me for weeks doing really heavy lifting (Sonar, Vegas Pro, and Camtasia all running simultaneously, with Sonar talking to the V-Studio via ASIO, and both Vegas and Camtasia talking to an Octa-Capture via WDM). Then I read about how changing advanced settings from Programs to Background Services was a tweak for better performance under Windows, so I figured I'd give it a try.

Sonar X1 crashed three times in a few hours, so I went back to Programs. No more crashes, it's been running perfectly ever since.

So...is this "background services" thing something that maybe applied to XP, but it no longer relevant in the W7 world? Did I just get unlucky when I switched over? Coincidence? I dunno...from no crashes at all to three in one night, then no more crashes after switching back, seems like more than coincidence.

Yes, Noel busted this myth. Nothing that SONAR does or uses runs as a service. All you're doing is giving more priority to Windows housekeeping operations over critical application functions. Great for servers, but bad for workstations. My own personal experience with this tweak ranged from no benefit to the barely being able to run anything.

Thanks, Chuck. I guess inquisitive minds gravitate to the same thread titles. 


Then, again, it could be pure probability. 2300+ posts in four months may be a record for a new member!

I understood Noel's post and the enclosed quote to mean not literally the per-process priority, but rather the length of the time slice for all processes. Longer time slices waste less time in scheduling and favor getting long-running CPU work done with less competition, but aren't good for keeping interactive or I/O-active processes responsive. It means that long-running compute-bound processes can hog the processor better. That then gets paraphrased to "priority for background services".

Bill B

chipset/inf drivers video drivers interface drives and some times a bios= smooth sailing, keeping you system off line unless you realy
need to be, i havent crash'd yet !! knock on wood !!

After reading Noels post several years ago, I followed his advice and changed the process priority back to the default "Programs". Back in the day (ten years ago) changing the priority process to "Background" was one of those so called DAW tweaks that everyone did just out of habit. Noel stated it was not necessary and that they keep all of their benchtest" DAWs set to the Win default "Programs". That is all I needed to know. If it is good enough for Cakewalk's own DAW's then it is good enough for me. I honestly have not seen a performance difference either way, although my DAW's have always been quite stable. FWIW, the only DAW tweak I still use these day's is to up my PCI Bus priority for my Delta 66 PCI audio card from the installed default of "64" to "248". This does have a noticeable affect on the low latency performance of my PCI audio card, especially when using SONAR. I can achieve a whole buffer step lower crackle free. With this tweak, projects that would playback crackle free @ 256 samples can go down to 128, projects that were crackle free @ 128 playback can go down to 64 samples and still remain crackle free.

Cheers,

Billy Buck

How do I go about doing this on Win 7

I may be wrong, but I don't believe there are any free Win7 compatible PCI Latency Timer apps.
The one I use is only XP compatible.

Cheers,

Billy Buck