Renicing and disk usage priority

[George Magklaras]

You can have a look at the manual page for the ionice. I believe you 
will get your answers there. In short, the simple 'nice' will take care 
of the CPU cycles, but that does not always mean an optimum IO 
performance, because that depends on the rest of the process workload 
and whether your system will try to be fair to the other processes based 
on the peculiarities of the processes you are running . ionice will let 
you fine-tune the IO requirements of your processes in a better way. The 
examples at the end of the manual page are indicative of what you can do.

Best regards,
GM




Kristoffer Knigga wrote:
> Hello, all,
> 
> I have a server that's running a bunch of processes that I believe are disk bound.  The server is an 8-way machine running at about 60% idle, and each process averages about 3% of one processor (they are all single threaded).
> 
> Now, I have one of these processes that I need to have running at a higher priority when it comes to disk access.  Does renicing a process effect its ability to fight for disk resources, or just processor?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Kris Knigga
> 

-- 
--
George Magklaras

Senior Computer Systems Engineer/UNIX Systems Administrator
EMBnet Technical Management Board
The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo,
University of Oslo
http://folk.uio.no/georgios