MATLAB Parallel Computing Toolbox and Process Priority Settings

Before I started using MATLAB Parallel Computing Toolbox, I often set the priority of MATLAB in the Task Manager in Windows as either High or Realtime to speed up the execution. Now, after running a code using the aforementioned toolbox, I started to see several instances of MATLAB in the list of ongoing processes, so which instance should I increase its priority to gain more speed? Should I change them all? Does changing the priority even has any effect in terms of speed in this case?

[Raymond Norris]

I can't tell you if it actually helps, but if you're going to change the Task priority, you'd probably want to do it for all the MATLAB processes you see running. You should expect to see a number of MATLAB.exe processes (the size of the pool you started, plus one for the client). You could try then running the following from within MATLAB

[FAILED,~] = system('wmic process where name="MATLAB.exe" CALL setpriority "high priority"')

Again, not sure how well this will work.

[Kareem Elgindy]

Thanks for your time to answer this question, but I think the answer to this question is still open.

Answer 1

[Alvaro]

The MATLAB central file linked in Edric's answer should let you modulate priorities when called within an spmd block:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/89854-setting-default-priority-for-matlabpool-processes#answer_99313

Regarding on whether it would help or not, I would think that it depends on the number of resource-hungry processes that you have running on your machine. Basically, if you close all the other programs you have running besides MATLAB then setting a higher priority should not significantly affect the performance of your MATLAB workers.