Worthwhile or not?
As many of you know, you can fire up the Windows Task Manager to temporarily change the priority of a running process. Just go to the Processes tab and right-click the process of interest. Your choices are realtime, high, above normal, normal, below normal, and low. Any changes that you make to the priority of a running process are not persistent – that is, they won’t carry over to future invocations of that process – but they can have a big impact on performance. I’m curious if any of you have experimented with tweaking process priorities on your systems. In the next couple of installments, I’ll explore what others have done, but I can start off the discussion by saying that I’ve noticed a big change on some database servers when they are performing compute-intensive tasks.
