Update: new question re multiprocess FF & RAM use

[JLJ]

FF 52.9.0 ESR x64 under Windows 7 x64

OK ignore the original question below ~ changing process priority didn't do much of anything.

New question: still playing around with process count settings, I am finding that anything higher than 1 actually causes my RAM use to go down -- counter to everything I've been told to expect. With a setting of 1 FF can rocket up to over 1.2GB RAM use, which locks it up badly; set at 2 RAM never seems to rise above about 900K in total; at 3 it maxes out at about 840K overall. Either I'm doing something wrong, or I'm doing something... right. Should I be worried about some unintended consequence I'm unaware of?

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As part of efforts to ease the effects of Windows' Spectre/Meltdown mitigations for my old Core 2 Duo CPU I've force-enabled multiprocess in FF, setting process count to 2. It works well, using only a little more RAM than single-process but running smoother.

Playing around further I've manually set process priority to Above Normal using shortcut syntax cmd /c start/AboveNormal firefox.exe. However Task Manager reports that only one FF process -- presumably the parent -- is running Above Normal, and the second (child?) process is running as Normal.

Is there any way to change both (all) FF processes (on a permanent basis) -- and/or is it necessary / effective / desirable to do so? THX

[kerft]

There are AFAIK no in the wild attacks that use spectre or meltdown. If you can run without the mitigations you might be happier. On a slow computer, disabling Flash and using adblocking is often helpful. There also are power management settings in windows and in bios for most computers, laptops as well as desktops. Typical default settings will vary speed and processor voltages to save power, at the cost of lower performance. If you need or want to, you can adjust those in the direction of better performance.

[Brummelchen]

windows policy is per selected task, not by name as process lasso do. but i wont recommend to set abovenormal for firefox because the rest of your dual core will show up issues, firefox will block it due this