Windows – Automatically starting a child process with ‘High’ priority

firefoxpluginspriorityprocesswindows 7

My computer running Windows 7 is getting old, and Flash content stutters a bit too much. I am finding that elevating the priority of the plugin process helps a lot.

I know of the /high switch to start an executable with 'High' priority, but I don't know how to raise the priority of a child process (plugin executable kicked off by a (parent) browser process) automatically.

I'd like to do this without installing any additional software on the machine. If there's a way to do this from the browser itself (I use Firefox and Chrome), it'd be even better.

Also, FMI: Are there any possible unintended consequences that I may be overlooking?

Best Answer

Whenever I play a Flash video in Firefox a couple of instances of FlashPlayerPlugin_11_7_700_224.exe start up (version number will obviously change over time). You can run the following command to set the priority of a process from the command line:

wmic process where name="FlashPlayerPlugin_11_7_700_224.exe" setpriority 32768

However, doing this when you start Firefox will not work since the FlashPlayerPlugin process is started on-demand, and killed once it is no longer required. So you can create a batch file that you can run as and when required, or perhaps schedule the file to be executed every say 10 mins. or so.

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