Hey devs, would it be possible for you to modify Rosetta to use the background priority on Windows Vista and later? I ask because I run Rosetta on 7 of my 8 cores, which consumes around 3.3 GB of memory. I only have 8 GB total, which isn't enough for Chrome, Planetside 2, and Rosetta all at once. As such, I set PS2 as an exclusive application so that Rosetta gets suspended when I launch the game. This all works great.

The problem comes in when I exit the game. BOINC sees the game close, and starts all 7 Rosetta processes back up. At the same time. My hard drive is kinda slow, and each instance of Rosetta needs to read a lot of data from disk on startup. This makes my computer almost unusable for 2-3 minutes as whatever I'm doing has to contend with 7 other processes, each with a mile-long list of files to be read.

If Rosetta used Background priority, all other disk IO would be prioritized over it, solving my problem, and probably that of at least a few other people as well. What do you guys think?

I hadn't heard of the "background priority" before, so thanks for that :) For anyone else who hasn't, it's the same as Idle, but considers the priority of memory and disk activity as well as the CPU:

http://betanews.com/2012/02/17/process-explorer-15-13-adds-background-priority-setting/

It seems sensible to me - can you assign the threads that priority manually for now? Using one of these programs perhaps?: http://superuser.com/questions/65108/setting-process-priority-everytime-it-is-launched I guess BOINC needs to stay at a higher priority which makes things slightly less straight-forward.

Also, you might see a benefit from using a USB flash drive as ReadyBoost. I know internet wisdom generally suggests it makes no difference unless you're RAM-constrained, but as it helps with speeding cached reads so might help in your situation.

Danny

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Yes, I can manually assign the background priority manually, using Process Explorer, or just assign the priority to boinc.exe and let the new Rosetta processes inherit it since Boinc doesn't really need a higher priority than the tasks it runs. But if possible, I'd like to see this behavior built into the program by the devs as the default behavior.

Unfortunately, I don't have any flash drives fast enough for ReadyBoost. But in a way, you're right; I am RAM constrained. It's not uncommon for PS2 to eat huge gobs of memory due to the nature of the game, and I regularly see my system running at >7.5 GB of memory usage. This doesn't leave much room for the filesystem cache, which is exactly the problem ReadyBoost was designed to alleviate. If anyone else is in a similar situation and is encountering the same problems, I'd certainly recommend looking into ReadyBoost if just buying more RAM isn't an option.

The task priorities are actually established by BOINC Manager. So your request should be directed to the Berkeley BOINC newsgroup or message boards.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense