Yet another warning about these 'booster' utilities that set the foreground process priority class to High

I wanted to take a minute to issue yet another warning about these gimmicky process optimization utilities that do nothing more than set the foreground process priority class to High. You may say, "well, that seems reasonable", but the truth is that it is NOT effective and can be VERY dangerous. That is why foreground boosting is disabled in Process Lasso by default.

The Windows Scheduler already gives foreground threads higher precedence by giving them longer time slices. You do not want to give them a higher priority because this can lead to starvation of other CRITICAL system processes. Not only does theory say additional foreground boosting is ineffective, but so does empirical evidence. Hundreds of tests on our systems have shown foreground boosting to be ineffective and dangerous. Not only does it not work to improve responsiveness or speed of the foreground process, it can result in priority inversions and maybe even deadlocks in an unlikely worst case scenario. It would definitely result in deadlocks if Windows didn't have built in deadlock avoidance.

This is why Process Lasso's ProBalance algorithm lowers select background process priorities instead of foreground boosting. Furthermore, even a ProBalance like mechanism must be carefully tuned and tested. We have spent years refining our algorithm, and use it every day ourselves -- unlike these slimy developers who just want to sell you something, whether it works or not.

Now, can foreground boosting sometimes boost performance of some applications in some scenarios? Sure, but in such cases it is better to change their default/persistent priority class instead of boosting each process that goes to the foreground to the High priority class. That is not what you want to do, trust me.

I am busy programming this morning and don't have the time to go into detail again, but please do not use these utilities! They are created by developers who want to do something *really* simple (can be done in a few lines of code) and claim it boosts your PC performance. Please, stay away!

More written on this here: About ProBalance and the Windows CPU Scheduler