3 ms·
/usr/bin/nice is your friend
- Maciek416 17y agoI'd like to see some numbers showing how much of a difference in overall system performance was attained due to the changes he made.
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoThe system is largely idle, so there aren't any great #s on overall system performance. The key is when some background process runs, e.g. a backup, it now runs at lower priority. So when you try to do other stuff during that backup, the other (more important stuff) completes faster.
- gaius 17y agoNaive use of nice can kill performance. If you have any sort of shared resource on your system, you're begging for a priority inversion. Much more useful is the Solaris Fair Share Scheduler.
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoGotcha. The machine is for one purpose only. And it is running on FreeBSD, not Solaris. I was careful to try to not be so naive about the values.
- gaius 17y agoI've seen people renice one of Oracle's many processes then wonder WTF happened when every Oracle process is then waiting for that one to release a lock. Oops :-)
- pmiller2 17y agoIf, as the author claims, this one process was chewing up resources by doing a lot of random i/o, the right tool to fix the situation is really ionice(1). ionice(1) modifies the i/o priority of a process in the same way that nice(1) modifies the CPU priority. It's such a handy tool -- I'm always amazed more people don't know about it.
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoUnfortunately, ionice is not avail on FreeBSD.