Re: process in background

2009-04-23 Thread Matyas Sustik 
Some more data as suggested.  I run without nice, with nice -n 5 and nice -n
10, each version twice:

Without nice:
real0m10.662s
user0m9.513s
sys 0m3.448s

real0m10.121s
user0m7.712s
sys 0m2.444s

CPU% according to top reached 118%.


nice -n 5:
real0m22.141s
user0m27.202s
sys 0m1.444s

real0m21.855s
user0m28.674s
sys 0m2.468s

CPU% according to top reached 147%.


nice -n 10:
real0m21.638s
user0m26.878s
sys 0m1.268s

real0m21.654s
user0m27.090s
sys 0m1.176s

CPU% according to top reached 131%.

I do not trust the accuracy of top; I only use it to see relative CPU usage
of processes running *at the same time*.  The above results speak for 
themselves.

However the cpu usage reported by 'time' shows that nice incurs a hefty
penalty even though the system does nothing else.

I stress that I do not think that the above indicate a problem with nice.
This maybe just how it works.  I think I need something other than nice to
tell the system that a process should be given all the spare cycles but
nothing else.

Any suggestions?
Matyas
-
Every hardware eventually breaks.  Every software eventually works.


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process in background

2009-04-22 Thread Matyas Sustik 
Dear Forum,

I am running a video encoding process for which I would like to use all the
CPU resources which would otherwise be idle.  I do not want this job to get
in the way of any other processes (interactive or something like mythbackend).

I tried using nice -n 19 but the result is noticably slower execution of the
encoding job even when there is nothing else going on.  (About 30-50 slower.)

Is there some other process management tool that could help achieve the goal?
Thanks,
Matyas
-
Every hardware eventually breaks.  Every software eventually works.


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