I have a scheduled task which is very CPU- and IO-intensive, and takes about four hours to run (building source code, if you're curious). The task is a Powershell script which spawns various sub-processes to do its work. When I run the same process interactively from a Powershell prompt, as the same user account, it runs in about two and a half hours. The task is running on Windows Server 2008 R2.

What I want to know is why it takes so much longer to run as a scheduled task - more than an hour longer. One thing I noticed is that the task scheduler runs at Below-Normal priority, so when my task starts, it inherits the same lowered priority. However, I've updated the script to set the Powershell process priority back to Normal, and it still takes just as long.

Anybody have an idea what could be different between the two scenarios? I've ruled out differences in processor and IO load - this task is the only thing the system is used for, so there's nothing else running that could be competing for resources.