0.6.0 Par2/Unrar priority

[cmg]

Is there any way to set par2/unrar priority (windows) in sabnzbd 0.6.0?

Thanks,
Cg

[shypike]

Alas, unlike Linux, Windows doesn't have the tools we need for this.
Only unrar has some priority support and we use that already.
What we would really want is disk priority support, but alas...

[andygr]

For the unrar part: I´ve put a rar.ini file with switches=-ri1:2 in it (goes into the dir where the unrar.exe resides). This works great - no disk trashing anymore.

    -ri[:]
            Set priority and sleep time. Available only in RAR for Windows.
            This switch regulates system load by RAR in multitasking
            environment. Possible task priority values are 0 - 15.

            If is 0, RAR uses the default task priority.
            equal to 1 sets the lowest possible priority,
            15 - the highest possible.

            Sleep time is a value from 0 to 1000 (milliseconds).
            This is a period of time that RAR gives back to the system
            after every read or write operation while compressing
            or extracting. Non-zero may be useful if you need to reduce
            system load even more than can be achieved with parameter.

            Example:

            execute RAR with default priority and 10 ms sleep time:

            rar a -ri0:10 backup *.*

[shypike]

Now that you bring it up.
I have checked the code and we don't use this option.
BTW: it's hard to find a generic value that would benefit most systems.
Maybe we could add it as an "extra parameter" field, like we did for nice/ionice on Linux.

This still leaves par2, which is actually worse at disk thrashing.

[cmg]

Thanks for the advice. I have not looked at the sabnzbd code, and I know this would be specific to windows, but when I wrote some code for a program that monitored par2 creation is VS.net I was able to start it with a specific base priority that matched the options in task manager.

Thanks,
CG

[shypike]

So far Windows offers only CPU priority, what you really need is disk priority,
especially for repairs.

[cmg]

Hmm. For my specific case I may actually care more about CPU priority. My download and repair is to one drive and I use XBMC to play videos but they are off a different drive. I am looking for Par2/Unrar not to interfere with the CPU tasks currently going on as I intend to do some VLC VOD with output transcoding enabled.

[shypike]

What you can do is lower SABnzbnd's priority from the task manager.
This priority will be inherited by the tools it runs.