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WARNING: Only `renice` to -10
Authored by: foobar104 on Jun 19, '03 11:22:29AM

Erm, I don't think that's true. Priorities are arranged in bands. You have normal user jobs at the bottom, kernel tasks above them, and real-time tasks at the top. Real-time tasks can be scheduled in such a way that the operating system itself can't interrupt them, but this requires special programming and superuser privilege. Ordinary user tasks--tasks not running as the root user--can't preempt the kernel.

Nice doesn't set the scheduling priority of a task. It just nudges the task up and down a little in the priority queue. So doing a nice -20 isn't going to hurt anything.

(Incidentally, nice makes perfect sense when you remember the intent of the command: it's called *nice*. You use it to set the "niceness" value of a task. More nice means less priority. Less nice means more priority. So nice -20 is higher priority and nice +20 is lower priority.)



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