To Affinity and Beyond!

Posted 07/28/2008 at 10:35am | by The Maximum PC Staff

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I just completed a minor upgrade to my system, including the addition of a brand-spankin’-new Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU. My question: When you right-click a process in task manager it gives you the option to set affinity. If I’m right, this gives you the ability to set a process or task to a particular core of your CPU.

It seems like this would help distribute the load of everything running and keep things flowing smoothly, but it looks like every process is set to use all four cores.

Is there a right or wrong way to go about changing these settings? Is it advisable to change them? I would think that if you divided them up, you could gain a performance advantage.

The Doctor has not manually set the affinity for an application, but he doubts that it would yield any performance benefit that would be worth the time spent setting the affinity of each program on your machine. You’d also have to reset the affinity each time you started the application. While this can be done automatically with Innes.org’s ROPE utility, it’s a moot point. The Doctor thinks it’s best to let the OS handle thread-scheduling.