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 |
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