Bitsum: The Great PC Optimization Debate - Process Lasso

[_CyberGhosT_]

The Great PC Optimization Debate

• Author: Jeremy Collake
• Date: 22 Sep 2016
• Categories: Note from Jeremy

When it comes to PC Optimization, images of snake-oil and con-men often come to mind, and indeed the problem of fraudulent or misleading software is pervasive in this genre and many other software genres.

Bitsum does optimization along with much more, like automation. We never did it the classical way — You know, registry cleaners and useless or even harmful ‘features’. (side note: If you want to use a registry cleaner, it’s fine, but its for your own psyche, not actual performance).

In general, I hope we can all agree that those old style utilities like ‘RAM defragmentation’ (ROFL) are totally useless, and detrimental to performance. Now, here I must profess to creating SmartTrim, but I only very reluctantly created SmartTrim because the other RAM management products were so dumb. They just whack every process on the system, forcing a page out of all memory, then the actively referenced virtual memory pages get paged right back in within milliseconds (hopefully!). Users were asking, and I had to provide something better, so I did. It acts selectively and with precision. Still, it is disabled by default in Process Lasso, and is only recommended for the rare user who truly does need to have a process paged out (note that watchdog rules can also be used in Process Lasso to page a process out when it exceeds X consumption).

So, I focused my optimization on what we were already doing, automation. I wanted to optimize based on real-time user behavior. And so I did. ProBalance was born. Process Lasso was born to contain it. And ProBalance turned out to really be a winner, an optimization we can demonstrate in both real-world and synthetic tests, which is rare.

I wanted to optimize based on real-time user behavior. And so I did. ProBalance was born, an optimization we can demonstrate in both real-world and synthetic tests, which is rare.

Therefore, since Process Lasso and other projects contain optimizations, here I am in this genre. In the last 20 years I’ve learned a lot about it.

As I see it, there are these camps of people (of course they can change as they evolve and learn), and in-between is the truth.

• Zero-Tweakers
  These people believe the Windows OS’s management of all hardware resources is superior to any third-party, so it should be left alone entirely.
• Human-Assisted Optimization
  This is a class of people who know that in certain circumstances, third-party software can either be more intelligent than the OS, or enable the user to be more intelligent than the OS. Why? How? Because the OS doesn’t really know what your user intent is, but the user does, or some optimization software might. The user and high-level software has a different awareness than the OS, which is not an AI – it is just trying to appropriately juggle threads. It is also far from perfect, as we’ve demonstrated here at Bitsum more than once. Heck, Intel took over core parking in Skylake (6th Gen) because the OS just couldn’t do it well enough. Not necessarily the OS’s fault, but it is the case none-the-less. In short, you know what you are doing, and what you are about to do, so can tune your PC for that. This is NOT justification to do/try any random tweak and hope for the best, but it is justification to pragmatically explore your options.
• Over-Tweakers
  These people have unfortunately went down the rabbit hole of tweaking, trying to get a marginal performance boost, but often do more harm than good. They sometimes oscillate between good and bad performance as they try different things, or random interactions with multiple optimization applications occur.

As with so many things in life, the truth lies in the middle. I think this reasoned argument should prove persuasive, though does not answer any individual question about ‘should I tweak X’. That answer depends on a lot of factors in a very complex software ecosystem.

What do you think? Is Real-Time Optimization alive, or is all PC Optimization a relic and we should leave it to the OS and apps?

 

[Deleted member 178]

OS built-in management features are made to fit every systems without hampers, so of course , you are room for specific system tweaks .

 

[frogboy]

The main tweak id do which seems to make the most difference for me is to change the visual effects to a bare minimum.

 

[_CyberGhosT_]

The main tweak id do which seems to make the most difference for me is to change the visual effects to a bare minimum.

Yep, it helps, disabling Aero is another old trick done by many gamers in my circle.

 

[hjlbx]

LOL... users can perform manual balancing - when required - in Windows Task Manager.

 

[Evjl's Rain]

it's one of the best tools I have ever used. However, it should be tweaked manually in some cases especially games because it always restrains the games so we will experience lags and fps drops. We have to classify them as Games
Also it may decrease the speed of something if we already have a good CPU. For low-end PCs, we can't notice any slowdown but for good PCs, it may have negatives effects if we don't know how to tweak it properly

 

[Rebsat]

The best of it's kind

 

[Neno]

Tweak's are men't for outdated (deficit) systems to perform as good as they can under overwhelming new tasks. There is no point in tweaking new rigs under new OSes, everything is already optimized (at least well enough). And even if you need to tweak a thing or two you definitely don't need a third party program. Actually everything you could ever need for Windows based systems is already there, you only have to learn to be aware of it. Windows is a great system.

 

[hjlbx]

"In short, you know what you are doing, and what you are about to do, so can tune your PC for that."

Process Lasso developer's words, and not mine...

Like everything worthwhile, you have to know what you are doing - otherwise you are apt to wreck yourself.

 

[_CyberGhosT_]

Process Lasso 9 is still in the "Alpha" stages but Jeremy is moving at lightning speed
getting it ready, I am part of the Alpha phase of testing and this is shaping up to be
one Awesome product. Really impressed with his work and dedication.
It's currently at 9.0.0.79 if others are participating make sure your watching your
In-Box.

 

[jamescv7]

I've gathered a lifetime license from a giveaway (specific version only) which definitely helps to maintain the responsiveness on my system.

Since my task are little heavy like browsing + virtual machine + Android IDE/ or web coding thus something should control it.

 

[bitsum]

OS built-in management features are made to fit every systems without hampers, so of course , you are room for specific system tweaks .

Umm, that seems a bit cumbersome, and even dangerous. For instance, users will see 'High Performance' and set priority classes to that, when it does *not* make your process go faster. In fact, Windows already does this, and doing it further causes a thread or process priority skew that can cause issues like lags and hang-ups. I've studied it a lot.

ProBalance, by comparison, only goes *down* in priority classes, nailing the background offenders, then undoing the change when things calm down. This was after years of study, and there is a demo I wrote, and instructions on how to write your own demo (real simple) if you don't trust me.

Also, the automation, run process X with CPU affinity 1,2,3 and CPU priority class Z with power plan Z, etc... seems cumbersome to do every time.

But, yes, you can do these things, if you know enough, and want to manually do it every time.

it's one of the best tools I have ever used. However, it should be tweaked manually in some cases especially games because it always restrains the games so we will experience lags and fps drops. We have to classify them as Games
Also it may decrease the speed of something if we already have a good CPU. For low-end PCs, we can't notice any slowdown but for good PCs, it may have negatives effects if we don't know how to tweak it properly

Thank you . Honestly, one of the biggest things Bitsum did for gaming was the Bitsum Highest Performance power plan, which disables core parking and frequency scaling. This was create BEFORE Intel realized the OS could not unpark cores fast enough and so moved it to the chip. In other words, we were quite vindicated.

The best of it's kind

Thank you

Tweak's are men't for outdated (deficit) systems to perform as good as they can under overwhelming new tasks. There is no point in tweaking new rigs under new OSes, everything is already optimized (at least well enough). And even if you need to tweak a thing or two you definitely don't need a third party program. Actu
ally everything you could ever need for Windows based systems is already there, you only have to learn to be aware of it. Windows is a great system.

I disagree entirely for Process Lasso, but would agree for most of the old XP-style optimization software (which are marketing companies now, FWIW - they are out to milk you, not improve performance). As an engineer, I just can't live with myself if I did that.

As we hit the physical limit of processors we went parallel. This means that it is more important than ever to make sure your processes are running on the right cores, at the right times, parking on when it should be, off when it shouldn't, etc.. A thread can not be divided, so the goal is to keep the CPU as cool as possible for the next thread allocated to one of it's cores, that can hopefully be turbo-boosted (or a-alike).

Bottom line: We optimize for modern systems. We don't do that old XP-style 'clean your registry' crud. Our demo is as effective as it was 20 years ago.

 

[bitsum]

I've gathered a lifetime license from a giveaway (specific version only) which definitely helps to maintain the responsiveness on my system.
Since my task are little heavy like browsing + virtual machine + Android IDE/ or web coding thus something should control it.

Thank to you as well! You said it (in a way), this is an emerging market now that we can't make individual cores much faster without super-cooling them. Note that liquid coolers I highly recommend as they are maintenance free, quiet, effective, and barely more than standard coolers.

Gosh I struggle with those promotions. I want people to use the latest version of my software, but know some never will. I'll leave it up to you, but do know that thanks to abuse by some parasites (sites selling promotional codes of my software), these promotions will be less common the future.

For anyone here, I'll give you a discount code for 50% off - MALWARETIPS50 . You enter it on the final checkout page, at that time the price will change.

For FREE users (yes, you can use it freely indefinitely) the differences are here: How Free Is Free? What is Freemium? . There is an annoying nag that escalates very slowly over time to a max (which still isn't that bad, click 'Purchase' and it'll dismiss). I've been trying to remove that nag - did not put it in new products like CPUBalance and ParkControl - but to do that I have to make a bunch more features Pro-Only.

 

[molhopicante]

I just bought a lifetime license.

I hope I do not regret it ...

 

[dinosaur07]

This is a real good software, it definitely worths the money. I also bought a lifetime license for it.