I'm somewhat confused in regards to nice vs priority.

I sometimes renice a job in order to run it faster like a bzip.

But looking in top it certainly has given it a different nice value but it hasn't made any difference to the priority or somtimes it seems to change the priority with one digit only.

My intention is to actually speed up our backups, they run during the night but take way too long to complete thus givein people problem in the mornings.

It wouldn't be an issue to run them at higher priority in the middle of the night at the expenses of other services, I rather have this then running them late.

Do I renice the job? Can I increase the priority, and more so can I do this on a cronjob?

Thx

Just use "nice -nADJUSTMENT COMMAND". Man nice.

This is my current job:

/root/.scripts/backuppsa.sh >>/dev/null 2>&1

so do I go "nice -20 /root/.scripts/backuppsa.sh >>/dev/null 2>&1"

in my cronjob ?

Exactly.

A follow up question that though that just came to mind.

This backup script is full of tar and gzip commands.

So if I were to nice the script will these internal jobs in the script actually run at that nice level.

Or should I actualy edit all these jobs in the script entering all their nice values seperately?

As I understand, the base priority for children will be equal to the priority of the parent. In other words, just nicing the script should work. A brief test showed this to be the behavior on my system.