Bug#737651: Killer does not respect niceness

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

Sorry for the late reply.

[Pietro Battiston]
> Although no documentation is present in /usr/share/killer, I did get
> from the description of the package that if I want to run a script
> in background on a system where killer is been ran from a cron
> script, I have two options:
> a) install and use "condor"
> b) increase the niceness of the process.
>
> However the second does not seem to work. Here is how I reproduce:

Increasing nice-level is supposed to work, yes. :)

> 2) give the command "sudo -u someuser nice -n 1 sleep 100"

I believe you lack one key information.  The nice level must be
greater than 9.  The information is hidden in the manual page,
killer(1):

   removeNiceJobs
       This function removes all jobs that have a nice value greater than 9.
       That is, they have a lower sceduling priority than the default (0).

Thus, if you had used 'nice sleep 100' it would have worked, as the
default for nice(1) is 10. Using '-n 1' do not raise the nice level
enough to get killer to leave it alone. :)

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen