Process.ProcessorAffinity Property

Definition

Namespace:

System.Diagnostics

Assembly:

System.Diagnostics.Process.dll

Source:

Process.cs

Gets or sets the processors on which the threads in this process can be scheduled to run.

public:
 property IntPtr ProcessorAffinity { IntPtr get(); void set(IntPtr value); };

[System.Runtime.Versioning.SupportedOSPlatform("windows")]
[System.Runtime.Versioning.SupportedOSPlatform("linux")]
public IntPtr ProcessorAffinity { get; set; }

[<System.Runtime.Versioning.SupportedOSPlatform("windows")>]
[<System.Runtime.Versioning.SupportedOSPlatform("linux")>]
member this.ProcessorAffinity : nativeint with get, set

Public Property ProcessorAffinity As IntPtr

Property Value

IntPtr

nativeint

A bitmask representing the processors that the threads in the associated process can run on. The default depends on the number of processors on the computer. The default value is 2 ⁿ -1, where n is the number of processors.

Attributes

SupportedOSPlatformAttribute

Exceptions

Win32Exception

ProcessorAffinity information could not be set or retrieved from the associated process resource.

-or-

The process identifier or process handle is zero. (The process has not been started.)

NotSupportedException

You are attempting to access the ProcessorAffinity property for a process that is running on a remote computer. This property is available only for processes that are running on the local computer.

InvalidOperationException

The process Id was not available.

-or-

The process has exited.

Remarks

The value returned by this property represents the most recently refreshed affinity of the process. To get the most up to date affinity, you need to call Refresh() method first.

In Windows 2000 and later, a thread in a process can migrate from processor to processor, with each migration reloading the processor cache. Under heavy system loads, specifying which processor should run a specific thread can improve performance by reducing the number of times the processor cache is reloaded. The association between a processor and a thread is called the processor affinity.

Each processor is represented as a bit. Bit 0 is processor one, bit 1 is processor two, and so forth. If you set a bit to the value 1, the corresponding processor is selected for thread assignment. When you set the ProcessorAffinity value to zero, the operating system's scheduling algorithms set the thread's affinity. When the ProcessorAffinity value is set to any nonzero value, the value is interpreted as a bitmask that specifies those processors eligible for selection.

The following table shows a selection of ProcessorAffinity values for an eight-processor system.

Bitmask	Binary value	Eligible processors
0x0001	00000000 00000001	1
0x0003	00000000 00000011	1 and 2
0x0007	00000000 00000111	1, 2 and 3
0x0009	00000000 00001001	1 and 4
0x007F	00000000 01111111	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7