A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I read something about increasing the priority of the boinc.exe and/or boincmgr.exe processes in Windows. Is that still a recommendation?

I think I used to do that but completely forgot about it with a new build three years ago. I've had no complaints with the default "normal" priority settings until recently with BOINC manager hangs resulting in inaccurate elapsed time reporting.

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There's NO need to change the process priority of ANY of the various BOINC EXE's. Doing so could lead to system instabilities and Windows crashing. Same goes for the science apps from the various projects your computer is running.

The BOINC EXE's are not doing any of the science. BOINC's job basically is to do the management of all the various project science apps and displaying information from them in the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

The various bits of BOINC do not require any change in processing priority as all they do is load the project applications and run them in an appropriate sequence - both of which require very few resources. Even most projects' tasks do not need to run at an elevated operating system priority as they are generally very good at making the best possible use of the CPU and/or GPU.
One thing that does have a marked impact on processing performance is using the "use at most x% of CPU time" option - leave this set to 100%as anything lower has a disproportionate, detrimental impact on task performance, and can in the worst case reduce the life of the processor and memory. Use the "use x% of the CPUs" option to control temperature if it really does get too high.

I realize the BOINC exe's are not doing science, but only management and reporting. And it's the reporting that's hanging and making the "Elapsed Time" counter inaccurate.

The priority defaults to "normal" and that's where I have it.

Thanks.

It wasn't processing performance that drove this question, it was BOINC management and reporting performance.

Thanks.

Once task reaches its end the elapsed time of CALCULATION stops (provided the ask notifies BOINC), and the task now starts its reporting process, this is normally a two stage event, but some projects have added additional stages. The first stage is uploading the results files, the task notifies BOINC the files to be uploaded, and where the target server, a simple FTP process is used, the performance of which is highly dependant on the internet and the project servers so changing BOINC's priority will have no effect.
Once the upload s complete another flag is set telling BOINC to report, the project servers may set a delay, or may accept this notification "instantly" - here again the process is at the mercy of the internet and the project servers.

Now on to your question about the "management" part of BOINC. Like most managers this does very little. It looks after the scheduling of tasks t make sure they will all finish in time, it updates the various displayed counters, it co-ordinates the upload and download of tasks and results. All these are very small in terms of computation, so not affected by BOINC's priority. Many years ago I did some timing on the actual amount of processing BOINC did, and compared this to the task processing load - it was less than 0.1% when running eight concurrent tasks, and changing BOINC's priority had no measurable effect in the desired direction.