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I'm trying to run a very long and slow (but important) background process on my computer. It took all weekend and is still running.

The problem is that this process scans dozens of GBs of disk files (some local, some on the network), and Windows apparently likes to page out all other programs so that it can use almost every megabyte (out of 4GB RAM) as disk cache for this one program. This occurs despite the fact that I used task manager to set its priority to "low". Not only does Windows page out everything else, this low-priority process seems to be given "first dibbs" on the hard disk, so other apps can take a few minutes to be paged back in. This disrupts all the other work I want to do.

I'm on Win7 x64, but I have observed the same phenomenon in WinXP (I'd say it's worse on XP... at least in Win7 when I use a single program for awhile it becomes responsive again.)

Other than disabling the paging file entirely, which requires a restart anyway, is it possible to limit the disk cache used by a single process, or by the system as a whole?

Qwertie
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1 Answers1

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You're not being aggressive enough. Windows 7 will not take away I/O priority until you decrease the priority even further, from "low" to "idle".

Windows XP doesn't have I/O priorities. It will always have this problem, even with "priority idle" processes.

MSalters
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