On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Brian J. Beesley wrote:
> On 6 Jan 00, at 21:08, Andrew L. Neporada wrote:
>
> > I am running mprime v 19.1 for FreeBSD, and sometimes I stop it using STOP
> > signal ( especially when I want to see some films or so -- my computer is
> > not fast enough ). Could this practice cause errors in LL test? I
> > understand, that I maybe should just interrupt mprime and then launch it
> > again, but I don't like this solution.
>
> Should be totally safe.
>
> Why not use "nice" to run mprime at a lower priority, in which case
> you should be able to leave it running in the background without
> making foreground applications run slowly? mprime will still get all
> the free CPU cycles available, so it won't slow down except when you
> give the system something "more important" to do.
>
> Regards
> Brian Beesley
>
Yes, I'am using "nice" at maximum level (20 for FreeBSD), but I think this
is not enough, especially when I run programs that eat a lot of CPU and
memory (for example X,netscape, and compiling something big at the same
time). Another example: there is a significant amount of UNIX (FreeBSD)
boxes in our institute. This boxes are used mainly as workstations, but
sometimes people run some CPU intensive calculations (C or Mathematica)
that takes hours of CPU time. When mprime runs at nice=20 and another CPU
intensive program runs at nice=0, mprime eats about 30% of CPU. This is
not acceptable, I suppose. So, I write a small daemon that monitors system
load and stops mprime when average (average period 5 min) system load
become more then 1.8 and run it again when this value become less than 0.4.
It's a very simple program. Maybe this feature should present at mprime?
What is your opinion?
P.S. Sorry for my English.
Andrew.
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