A word of caution though, to anyone who uses this method, only do this to machines that you do not intend on using for any sort of normal
activities, in between folding sessions. Setting the cpu priority to high, pretty much renders that machine unusable for anything but folding.
The recovery time, lags anywhere from 10-15 seconds, and on older machines, up to 60 seconds. If anyone else is going to be using that machine, then
you need to warn them, that they can't just shake the mouse, and begin surfing. What you're doing, by cranking the cpu priority up, is decreasing the "detected" idle time, so if you quit surfing, for even a half second, the core is back to 100%, and the time it takes to resore cpu resources back to other programs, is also increased. ie, it's quicker to shoot up to 100% utilization, and slower to release the cpu, for other activities.
I've only got 12 machines that I can do this on, and they're all older AMD 1.2's, that were retired from active service anyway, and are doing nothing
but taking up space, and heating my garage.
But for machines that wouldn't otherwise be doing anything, Berni is right, this will give you anywhere from 5-20% boost in efficiency.
disclaimer ---- previous post...
That 5% to 20% estimate means, your mileage may vary. But me, for one, am not going to sit there, with a stop watch, timing frames, as I'm tweaking cpu settings. On the surface, it appears to make your machine marginally faster, but then when you consider the "babysitting" aspect, my inclination is to say "nah"... it ain't worth it.
Finishing up a 72hr workunit in 61hrs, isn't worth it, if you have to run through all of your cpus, to make sure that they're all reset, and tweaked again.
Fire them up, and forget them. If you don't see one show up in the 7 day period, hunt it down, and find out what's wrong.
This is fun, but it doesn't have to be obsessive.