AutoHotkey Community

Hi!
I need to pause a process that has not been started by my script. I know its PID, process name or exe path to identify it.
Is it a way to pause and resume that process, in a manner similar to changing its priority?

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r0lZ

I don't think J Random Process can be paused. can you set the priority th the lowest setting?

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(Common Answers) - New Tutorials Forum - Humongous FAQ

Well, it's possible, of course, but the goal is to pause it completely, to avoid heavy IO operations.

When two processes are writing large files to disc at the same time, the CPU load of each process is usually not high, and therefore even with both processes running at idle priority, too many disc accesses occur.

I would like to launch several instances of the same program, and pause all of them but one to minimize the IO operations. When the first process has finished its job, the next one should resume automatically. Unfortunately using the idle priority is not sufficient in this case.

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r0lZ

you could use PsSuspend launched via ahk's run command.

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Steve F AKA Superfraggle

http://r.yuwie.com/superfraggle

Nice finding!

But, IMO, the existence of this tool proves that there must be some kernel function able to do what I need. I would like to use it instead of an external tool.

Thanks anyway!

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r0lZ

if you can find a related function in MSDN, post here, and a DllCall wizard may be able to figure out how to call it.

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(Common Answers) - New Tutorials Forum - Humongous FAQ

Unfortunately, I have just browsed the MSDN site, and found nothing directly exploitable (except, perhaps, SuspendThread, but I don't know how to retrieve the thread information.)

Also, PsSuspend source code is not available any more. Pity!

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r0lZ

This one Looks like it has full source and description, should be able to establish what to do from that.

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Steve F AKA Superfraggle

http://r.yuwie.com/superfraggle

Thanks!

Currently, I have implemented the pause using pssuspend.exe and it works pretty well, although it is better to hide the windows pertaining to the suspended process (as they are not refreshed any more.) Luckily, it's easy to do with AHK, but I have still to improve the method to hide ALL windows sharing the same process.

Also, as you can imagine, pausing a system process can be extremely dangerous. For example, suspend explorer.exe to see what I mean, and prepare to reboot!

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r0lZ

Yeah I know what you mean, I used to use a pssuspend remotly at work combined with a few other apps.

Locking the PC first then pausing winlogon was a good one lol.

Remote task manager has a front end that can perform this task too. And can do it remotely too.

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Steve F AKA Superfraggle

http://r.yuwie.com/superfraggle

I have searched the forum, but couldn't find the answer. How can I retrieve the complete list of all windows opened by a specific process? (I am already able to find the parent window of the process, but cannot find the children.)

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r0lZ

Ah, OK! I didn't know the ahk_pid %PID% trick.
Huge thanks!

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r0lZ