NewView Task Priority

Long: Have the SL Client's (newview.exe) system thread priority automatically be set to Lowe than normal priority when it doesn't have the focus or when it is minimized. That way, when you change over to a web browser for a minute to look at the LSL Help, LSL Wiki, or the SL forums, other programs can get some time on the processor.

Short: Have the SL Client let other programs run when the SL Client doesn't have focus or when it's minimized.

i totally agree... though a simple sleep(0); win32 api call at the end of each frame render would more or less have the same effect (aka at the end of each frame rendered the computer would automatically peek at each active task before SL rendered the next frame)

This wouldn't have much of an effect at all on the SL client's frame rate, but would have a HUGE effect on SL's multi-taskability as it were... given that odds are every other program would be guaranteed at least 5-10 active slices on the processor a second. If no oither applications are pending processor time the whole event takes literally on the order of microseconds... its not a true 'wait' state... its more of a 'share nice now' kind of state

I've done a similar tecnique on a data acquisition thread and on some 3d data visualization applications i've written in openGL and it's worked wonders for the rest of the system without hampering data collection or rendering framerates much at all (as an added bonus things like moving files around in the background etc won't be decimated by SL like they are now)

This would be nice. There are certian things that I try to do in the background which are just troublesome while SL is still up and running without being minimized.

It seems like creating a new connection to a web server is nearly completely blocked. So usually if I want to browse the forums without going "AFK" in SL, I have to change the task priority on newview.exe to be lower than normal so that I may navigate around the web without it taking 20 seconds to load a new page.

This may not be a universal problem because I've never noticed any problems running other programs while SL is running. I always have Winamp playing in the background, a couple explorer windows, a graphics viewer, and usually Photoshop is open and I switch between often. It's a little slow to switch to Photoshop but once it does PS seems to work as fast as ever. Just my personal experience.

if you have a hyperthreading CPU julian it won't be as big an issue as the processor can essentially introduce its own sleep(0) call at the end of every frame.. letting other applications have some time slices automatically

Sorry, I should have mentioned but I hate looking like I'm bragging about my system specs.

It's an Athlon XP 2000 so no hyperthreading. Lots and lots of RAM though if that makes a difference.

My PC is a 3yr old 1333mhz athlon thunderbird with 256 megs of ram running windows xp.
I have absolutely NO performance issues with SL, and I usually run several IM proggies and browser windows simultaneously.
Are you sure its not your connection being saturated? Try lowering your SL bandwidth cap in the network options.