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Renice
Authored by: professor on Jan 03, '02 10:10:40AM

Doing "renice -20" is a *really stupid* idea, unless your objective
is to lock up your computer.

Try "renice -1" first. Normally, that should be sufficient. If not,
go for "renice -5" or "renice -10".

The baseline priority for user processes is "0"; "-1" is, therefore,
higher priority than all your other applications. (Which make for a nice
Hint: to get smoother playing Quicktime movies, do a "renice -1" on the
PID of QuicktimePlayer.app.)



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Renice
Authored by: babbage on Jan 08, '02 11:59:03AM
Nah, it's not *that* bad. I don't think the runlevel system in OSX works quite the same way that it does in other versions of Unix. Apparently in the Public Beta & up through 10.0.4, executing "nice" or "renice" didn't do much at all. under 10.1 it certainly does have an effect, but it's not so dramatic as to bring the rest of the system to a halt if you tell a process to run at level -20.

In certain cases that can actually be pretty useful: if I'm installing anything with Fink I'll do so at runlevel -10 or -20, just because compilation is painfully slow otherwise, but I'm still able to do work in another terminal window, use the web browser, play iTunes, etc at the same time. Likewise, I keep setiathome running at level -20 in the background, and the foreground processes don't have much of a noticeable slowdown.

I would be reluctant to run any big processes at such a high priority -- Classic, IE, Mail.app, etc -- and it's possible that a future version of the operating system *will* "fix" the runlevel system in such a way that a -20 process will monopolize the system, just as you are describing. But as things stand now it does seem pretty harmless to do this. Try it before you complain! :)

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