Mark Russinovich at www.sysinternals.com has released freeware utility Frob that
allows you to sets NT foreground and background quanta. Useful to Windows NT
admin.
One of the most annoying characteristics of NT is
its lack of support for tuning various system performance settings such as the
foreground and background process quanta (a quantum is the
time-slice, or length of time a thread will run without being pulled off the CPU
for another thread to run). On NT Server, the quanta are fixed for both
foreground and background processes at 120ms, and on NT Workstation a background
process has a quantum of 20ms, and a foreground process has a quantum of either
20, 40, or 60ms (the foreground boost slider in the Performance tab of the
System applet in the Control Panel determines which). Well, here’s a little
applet that will let you “frob” the quanta to your liking. The new quanta will
immediately be applied to every process in the system and will also affect new
processes that are created.
