
/usr/bin/nice is your friend - epi0Bauqu
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/usrbinnice-is-your-friend.html
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pmiller2
If, 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.

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epi0Bauqu
Unfortunately, ionice is not avail on FreeBSD.

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gaius
Naive 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.

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epi0Bauqu
Gotcha. 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.

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gaius
I'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 :-)

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Maciek416
I'd like to see some numbers showing how much of a difference in overall
system performance was attained due to the changes he made.

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epi0Bauqu
The 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.

