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Phil Bull
philbull@gmail.com 2014
Decide whether a process should get a bigger or smaller share of the processor's time.
Fran Dieguez
fran.dieguez@gnome.org 2022

# Cambiar a prioridade dun proceso

You can tell the computer that certain processes should have a higher priority than others, and so should be given a bigger share of the available computing time. This can make them run faster, but only in certain cases. You can also give a process a lower priority if you think it is taking up too much processing power.

Go to the Processes tab and click on the process you want to have a different priority.

Right-click the process, and use the Change Priority menu to assign the process a higher or lower priority.

There is typically little need to change process priorities manually. The computer will usually do a good job of managing them itself. (The system for managing the priority of processes is called nice.)

# Unha prioridade máis alta fai que un proceso vaia máis rápido?

O computador comparte o tempo de procesado entre todos os procesos en execución. Isto é normalmente compartido de forma intelixente, xa que os programas que están facendo máis traballo automaticamente terán unha porción máis grande dos recursos. A maioría do tempo, os procesos obterán canto tempo de procesado como precisen, polo que xa estarán executándose tan rápido como sexa posíbel. Se cambia a prioridade non haberá diferenza.

If your computer is running several computationally-intensive programs at once, however, its processing time may be "over-subscribed" (that is, the processor's full capacity will be in use). You may notice that other programs run slower than usual because there is not enough processing time to share between all of them.

In this case, changing the priority of processes can be helpful. You could lower the priority of one of the computationally-intensive processes to free up more processing time for other programs. Alternatively, you could increase the priority of a process that is more important to you, and that you want to run faster.