On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 11:45:36AM +0100, Karel Kulhavy wrote: > >From the replies I got (none of which actually answered my question) it looks > like the "nice" state might be a state where the nice value != 0. Or less than > zero would also make sense. But it could be also that OpenBSD has the nice() > function like some other operating systems for giving up the scheduled time > back to the system and then the nice state might show amount of time > given up this way. So - what is the nice state printout actually?
The 'nice' column should be the nice level. If its 0, then its not niced either way. If its 2 then it has a niceness of 2, if its -2 then its niceness is -2 which means its not nice to other processes. Since the purpose of 'nice' is to adjust the scheduling priority, I don't think anything keeps track of the amount of time given up this way. Keep in mind, nice is only for processor scheduling while in userland. It doesn't affect scheduling of system calls or io. So a very nice process can still use up a lot of system resources by hogging disk or other I/O which itself can end up using CPU cycles. Doug.
