Only The Best

You know the story, you’re sitting there, knocking out some work and all of a sudden everything freezes while some unknown happenings are going on. Maybe Outlook decided to exercise god-like powers and take over 99% of your CPU cycles, maybe a poorly written application is bogging everything down, Windows Updates, slow network shares, the possibilities are endless. When it happens, what options do you have?

1. Wait obediently for [something] to finish its task.
2. Forcibly terminate the offending application, if known
3. Reboot because nothing is responding

With Process Lasso, this scenario is not entirely eliminated, but greatly reduced. The extent of the options and the configurability of Process Lasso makes it a very powerful tool while remaining fairly simple for the average user.

Process Lasso, in the default configuration, is configured to keep your processes behaving with each other. If a process takes up more than 95% of the CPU for more than 1.5 seconds, its priority is automatically lowered until its usage drops back to ‘normal’ levels. For basic usage, and probably most typical users, no additional configuration is required, just sit back and enjoy your new found responsiveness. PL does not slow down, suspend, or stop the offending application but reduced its priority. What this means, is that the application causing your system to hang is still carrying out whatever process it was, it just is not being given as much CPU time to do it, allowing other applications and the OS as a whole to remain responsive.

For the others, this is only the beginning of its phenomenal cosmic powers. The image on the right shows a section of the graph displayed at the top of the window. Bearing some resemblance to every task manager that has ever been, this one is a bit different. The green line shows system responsiveness while the red shows CPU utilization. While the two are closely tied together, they do not have a linear relation. That is, a CPU utilization of X% does not equal 100%-X responsiveness. The yellow shaded section displays where process restraint was in effect. At the standard update speed, this instance took about 2-3 seconds to bring things back under control.

Digging further under the hood leads to lots of additional options such as

• Specify processes that are not allowed to run.
• Change or set default priority and processor affinity¹ for processes.
• Exclude specific processes from restraint.
• Exclude the foreground application from restraint.
• Force specific or all processes to page out.²
• View or set whether a process starts at boot time.

When simply viewing the process list, much more detail is available than is present in Windows Task manager, as well as most task manager clones. Every process displays not only the usual stuff: name, priority, CPU usage, Memory usage, but also a description of each process, publisher information, startup settings, creation time, CPU affinity and filename.

This is not an exhaustive list of all the features. There are a lot of different logging options, audio notifications, and a few other tweaks for the more advanced users.

Pro’s

• A more responsive system
• A high level of control over system processes
• The ability to "free" up ram in two clicks
• Frequently updated (5 releases between 3/16/08 - 5/1/08)
• Simple setup and use
• Small footprint - 5MB for GUI, 2.5MB for core logic ³
• It’s FREE!

Con’s

• Has a tendency to disappear from the system tray for no apparent reason.⁴
• … That’s it!

There’s not much left to say, hop on over to the Process Lasso page at Bitsum Technologies for additional information and download links.

Filed under: Productivity, System Utilities