Any point in leaving a core unassigned to either Visual Studio or NCrunch?

Sometimes my pc just becomes completely unresponsive when I do simultanous tasks between different applications. As a sidenote, I always have Visual Studio on, with NCrunch every now and then running tests.

I was wondering whether I'll get any benefit from leaving one core as unassinged in the NCrunch Configuration. Will Visual Studio / Ncrunch use it at all, and will it thus be left over for 'the rest of the system'?

Hi, thanks for posting!

The straight answer is Yes. If you have a core that isn't assigned to VS or to NCrunch, then neither the VS UI nor NCrunch can touch this core. Note that from VS2012, VS does quite a bit using background threads, so it may still intrude upon this core a little (NCrunch cannot prevent this), but if you're looking to try to reserve some CPU for other tasks, then keeping a core unassigned may very well help.

I do also recommend keeping a close eye on your system resources to be certain the CPU consumption is the cause of your system responsiveness issues. Sometimes there can also be other causes (i.e. excessive I/O etc).

Yeah, I figured it out that it's actually I/O that's probably being the culprit here. That, and caching virtual memory that's being read and written to the disk, which NCrunch among other programs uses.

I've just done performance tuning on NCrunch, hoping that it's memory footprint will be less and that it'll have a smaller impact on my system.