There was some recent discussin of `nice' and the desire to leave a
long-running process at a high nice level and have it use spare cycles but not
impede interactive use.
I have use for this too. But with a twist. I don't really care whether the
long-running job gets 0% of the CPU or 5%. But I do care about swapping. I
have 1G on my machine. And my long-running process uses about 900M. And my
interactive use typically uses 200M. So when my long-running process runs,
it swaps out all of my desktop (emacs, etc). What I do now is every time I sit
down at my machine I suspend the long-running process to get interactive
response. And when I leave, I resume it. But sometimes I forget. And then I
waste a whole night's worth of cycles. Ideally, I'd like to set something up
that figures that if I didn't type at the console (or start a new process or
something like that) for the past, say, five minutes, then declare the machine
to be idle and OK to run my long-running-process. But immediately when I start
to type (or whatever puts my machine back in `interactive' mode) page out my
long-running-process, or at least don't let its page-in requests compete with
my interactive process page-in requests.
Basically, I think that the nice level needs to affect not only time slices in
the scheduler but also page-in or disk-access priority. Is that possible?
Jeff (http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/qobi)
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