J.C. Roberts wrote on Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 06:36:34AM -0700: > On Thursday 22 March 2007 22:08, Darrin Chandler wrote: >> On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 12:40:48AM -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
>>> Do you run the rebuild niced? >> I don't. I want it to be done as soon as possible. This makes very little sense to me. Nice is not designed for wasting CPU cycles or something. As long as no other processes are competing for cpu time, nice does little harm, as far as i know. > If you want your build done as soon as possible, then you would > use nice(1) as root to have the build process run at a higher > priority and hence receive more processing time. > > # nice -n -20 make build > > Is building at maximum priority, or even higher priority, > a smart thing to do? -I don't know. I think that's a bad idea. Sometimes, you need to log in during the build, checking top(1), systat(1), tail(1)ing logs and the like. You want good interactive system response for that. If you want to finish the build quickly, just refrain from running bloatware like kde and openoffice and firefox and thunderbird while you are about it, in particular in case you are short on memory. But do not try to make time longer or generate additional cpu cycles or whatever. It won't work, not even by negative nice(1) incantations. Besides, remember that the default settings tend to be sane for standard applications. Fiddling with random knobs is not recommended unless you have very special needs.
