i7 950 thread priorities issue/instability

[Miramonti]

I run 3 single-threaded database apps that are constantly calculating numbers during the day. I have 1 that is of primary focus to me and 2 that I essentially keep in the background.

In Windows7, when I set the thread priorities of the 2 background apps to "Below Normal", this ultimately leads to system crashes at some point during the day.

Does setting thread priorities with this processor to "below normal" commonly lead to instability, or could this more likely be isolated to my apps/configuration (or a win7 issue)? I don't seem to have any more success setting one app to "Above Normal" while keeping the others at "normal".

(fwiw, system is o/c'd to 4.09ghz but is very stable when leaving my apps at "normal" priority.)

 

[Maximilian]

I would lose the overclock but keep the priority settings and see if it still crashes just to eliminate that as a potential problem.

As far as i know the only setting that can mess things up is "realtime" but i havent played with process prioritization much.

 

[Caza]

The i7-950 has 4C/8T. Why bother adjusting thread priority at all when running 3 threads?

Seems you found an OC instability. Try it without OC and see if it still crashes with priorities raised.

 

[Miramonti]

I would lose the overclock but keep the priority settings and see if it still crashes just to eliminate that as a potential problem.

As far as i know the only setting that can mess things up is "realtime" but i havent played with process prioritization much.

Yeah, you're probably right, testing it without the overclock would be the sensible thing to try first.

The i7-950 has 4C/8T. Why bother adjusting thread priority at all when running 3 threads?

Seems you found an OC instability. Try it without OC and see if it still crashes with priorities raised.

In theory, because of the many cores/threads, the background apps should be able to run full steam w/o noticing hindrance in the foreground app I'm interfacing with. But that's just not the reality, it noticeably bogs things down a little bit, and I'd rather them get bogged down than the one I'm trying to work in.

I hadn't considered an o/c instability threshhold simply because of how stable it runs under "normal", but I do know that I'm riding not too far 'under the ceiling' with this o/c (atleast from what I was able to achieve), changing the thread priorities could perhaps be just enough to give it more than it can handle. (?) I'll test it out this week w/o the overclock.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

 

[Miramonti]

Setting the Affinity instead for each of my 3 application instances is working VERY well. Giving the primary app 2/3, and the background ones 4/5 and 6/7 respectively, leaving 0/1 for the OS etc. gives me no noticeable hindrance from the background apps when interfacing with the primary foreground app, and so far has been completely stable with the o/c as well. :thumbsup: