Scheduling priority for the 'nice' command
 

Hi all,

I'm trying to run seti@home on my RedHat 8 Linux box but I'm having trouble achieving the results I want.

I'm trying to duplicate the results I get on Windows. There I run seti@home with 'idle' priority. The result of this is that the CPU usage from seti@home drops to basically 0% when another hard crunching process with normal priority kicks in for a long while.

Now, I tried the same (or so I think) in Linux. I launched seti@home with:

nice +19 ./seti

However if I check the CPU time used by the seti process it hovers at around 8% even when another normal process that would otherwise need ~100% of the CPU time is running.

Is there a trick that I'm missing?

Thanks,
Nick

Try nice -19 ./seti... the smaller the number, the bigger the priority (or at least this is how i saw it works...) The process is not "nice" and needs a lot of CPU power... a "nice" process (high "nice" value) lets other programs execute if they need more CPU. There's a limit of how much CPU power can be given to a process through renicing. I think it's about 20-25%, dunno 4 sure.

Re: Scheduling priority for the 'nice' command
 

Well, I actually want to lower its priority (so per 'man nice' I should use a positive number.

That works just not as well as I expected it. I believe its because of differences in the process scheduling algos between Windows and Linux.

Nick