So why don't OS's have adapted harddrive load balancing?

[soccerballtux]

Why can't I tell the OS "when anything else asks for info from the harddisk besides WinRAR, immediately return that data and put WinRAR on the backburner"?

It's high time in my opinion.

 

[Zap]

Isn't that a feature built into WinRAR already? Something like running in the background? Also, you can alter the Windows Priority setting for an application while it is running (AFAIK it resets back to medium after you exit program). Just start up Task Manager, click on the Processes tab, right click on the process in question and find the Set Priority option.

 

[Roguestar]

^ Yeah, it is. Just click "Background" while the archive is being compiled.

 

[soccerballtux]

I'm talking more about like when I start copying a bunch of files between partitions or folders on my harddrive(s). For instance, I'm copying a bunch of photos over right now, and if I try to start a program or something, say, a game, both the copying and loading the game go slower.

OSes should let me prioritize some things over others-- like opening an application or game, and loading that level, vs. copying these 10GB of pictures I took.

 

[Roguestar]

Thread necromancy!

Perhaps they don't have that level of control built into windows because of the possibility of naieve users messing it up badly? Other than the standard program priority, there's little else you can do in regards asking the system to prioritize IO calls, that may end up messing with the scheduler.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
Why can't I tell the OS "when anything else asks for info from the harddisk besides WinRAR, immediately return that data and put WinRAR on the backburner"?

It's high time in my opinion.

You mean I/O priority schemes, like processor priority schemes? Vista added some of that, but it's not fully implemented, and it's not implemented in any win32 apps that I know of.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Yeah this sort of thing SHOULD be more commonly available, prioritizing "real time" relevant processes like interactive networking programs, music / video playing & recording programs, interactive games, et. al.

As has been noted, Vista has a sort of incomplete / often somewhat broken implementation of some of the process & I/O prioritization schemes in it. It doesn't really give the user very effective / easy control over the schemes, whereas what is needed is some kind of categorical "game / media / interactive" application designation and then a memory / network / CPU / I/O priority management scheme based on such categories.

UNIX/LINUX often provides pretty full control of such things via fairly fully exposed process prioritization classes and management utilities (e.g. 'nice') and has done so for years.

There are utilities you can get for windows to let you launch a given process with a given priority, though, so you could probably make 'wrapper' launchers for low priority things like rar, zip, whatever that will automatically give them lower priority. Similarly you could make elevated priority launchers for your games and media applications et. al. I'm not sure if the overall effect would be much better than just running Vista, though. In general if your PC is already under performing or overloaded in memory / disk / network / CPU capacity, just running extra stuff even when that extra stuff is done at low priority will still have a negative affect upon your main application's performance.

There is also a control panel setting to optimize performance for foreground applications versus background processes; the default is to optimize for foreground applications.