Set process priority to High: Dangerous?

Realtime isn't necessarily a "no-no". It just might starve other processes out of CPU cycles. Some applications can't handle that. Its something you would have to experiment with.

High should be less of a problem. However, you still need to monitor your system to see if all the applications are behaving well.

Here is how to change the process via command line, which you can put into a shortcut:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/191771

I would say it depends. If you only have one core/CPU on your computer, and it's a CPU-intensive task, I wouldn't set it to realtime. High might be okay, but that needs experimenting.

If you have multiple cores, and the process is single threaded: go ahead, set it however you want. Your other cores will still be free, even when one core is at 100% load the whole time.

If you have multiple cores and the process is multi threaded: it will depend if all threads will have 100% load. Some programs have a 'manager' thread that dispatches work to other threads but doesn't do a lot of processing itself. That would leave one core nearly free and thus allow for high or real-time priority.

Other programs will try to take in all cores. In this case high might be fine, but it needs experimenting.

Even others will only take a particular number of cores and might not use all cores available. In this case high or real-time priority should be fine.

Unless you're on a single core, go ahead, experiment. Most of the time it won't hurt to set it to high or even real-time. You can set the affinity of a process (how many cores it can use) in task manager as well. This way you can better balance the load on your CPU. It can also help keep temperatures and power consumption down, etc.

Whether this will work for you depends entirely on what your application does. If it's grinding through a long, long computation that never needs to wait for i/o, expect that running that at high priority could bring your machine to its knees. But if the issue is latency and your application just needs to wake up really fast in response to an i/o completion or similar event, do a little quick processing and then go right back to sleep again, it will be fine.

In general, every application that sets its primary process priority to anything other than normal will adversely affect everything else on your machine in terms of performance. So if every application took this attitude of self-importance, eventually nothing would work properly.

The correct way to use higher priorities is in individually threaded TASKS, not in APPLICATIONS. And these tasks should either run only as needed and then stop or suspend themselves when they have no work to do. If when writing an application you feel you need to change a priority base level, then think very hard about how to make the interval where this is necessary as short as possible.

It may even be worth investing in a book or a course about concurrent and parallel processing before you go anywhere near something like priority hiking.