Re: what's this "nice" unix thing?

Collin Ong (collin@mcd.intel.com)
Fri, 23 May 1997 09:47:41 -0700 (PDT)

I've been trying to run deschall heavily niced on some of the workstations
here but no matter how low a priority I set, deschall never drops all the way
to 0% when another process is run.

For example, if I run:

% nice -19 deschall gateway

I get the following using top:

PID USER PRI NICE SIZE RES STAT TIME CPU% COMMAND
23590 collin 126 19 136K 196K run 23:44 99.0% dc2

But if I run another computationally intensive process, deschall drops to
about 30% and the other process gets 70%. Since the other process is
likely to be a silicon simulation or something important, slowing this
down with the deschall process is not acceptable.

Am I doing something wrong or is there no way to get deschall to drop to
single digit CPU % when something else runs. Most normal processes run
at NICE level 0.

Can anything be done to further lower deschall's CPU usage when something
else is running? If so, I can get a bunch of workstations on the task
this weekend.

Thanks.