Apply low priority to low priority processes
My transmission client was hogging my machine. Then I realized I never really use process priorities for CPU and/or IO, which is actually a pretty bad thing, considering some processes just are there to get some job done, but don't need priority at all. Then I realized I also never use it for backup and such, which could be a problem for the server I'm running the backup on.
I already knew of the nice program, with which you can alter the CPU scheduling prioritization of processes. nice usually prefixes a command to start it up with altered 'niceness':
#!shell
$ nice -n 19 rsync -a ~ /net/share/backup
renice is used to alter an already running process's niceness:
#!shell
$ renice -n 19 -p $PID # where, of course $PID is de pid of the process you're altering
Pretty useful, and also pretty common knowledge, as far as I know. But then it dawned on me that CPU priority isn't at all what's useful here. You want I/O priority. So, a little googling lead me to ionice - how inventive a name - with which you can alter process I/O prioritization. Awesome!
#!shell
$ ionice -c 2 -n 4 -p 1234 # Give process 1234 "best effort" priority 4
You should read the man pages of nice and ionice to find out what the parameters mean (just because it's a good habit to read man pages, and not blogs ;)), but the basic usage is as follows:
#!bash
# start a process 'some command with arguments' with a niceness of 19.
# 19 means lowest priority, -19 means highest
nice -n 19 some command with arguments
# The process with pid 1234 gets a new niceness of 10, provided you are either root,
# or you are the owner of the process
renice -n 10 -p 1234
# The process with pid 1234 gets "Idle" class priority, which means it only gets I/O access
# when no other process needs it.
ionice -p 1234 -c 3
Use top and iotop to monitor the usage of CPU and I/O usage respectively. From now on, I'll be nice to the kernel and not let him figure out all the prioritization. Wow that's cheesy :o