Re: dialup priority
On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 05:59:30PM -0600, Adam Majer wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 09:55:56PM +0200, Ian Balchin wrote:
> > Hi, all,
> >
> > Shortly after booting up, machine probably had been off for 24h,
> > there is a flurry of activity from the hdd. I imagine this is the
> > file system being updated. A look at top, for instance, shows ls
> > being run and lots of other stuff too. This is a regular occurrence.
> >
> > At this time I was downloading the email when this happened (wvdial,
> > exim, fetchmail, etc) and the email download came to a grinding halt
> > while we had some many minutes of automatic operation tidy-up or
> > whatever. We don't get free local calls here, the local monopoly has
> > punitive rates designed to make them rich from internet surfers, so
> > this is a matter of serious concern.
>
> If you are running anacron, like I do, since the machine is down [there
> is no reason for it to be up], then when you turn on the computer, just
> wait for a few minutes or so until it's done updating..
>
> That is the easy thing to do... There might be a way of making all processes
> started by cron nice - that is make cron or anacron or whatever nice 10 or
> nice 19 process. Then all the children should have the same priority..
I have of course been careful to do that of late. I need to
investigate this further, so just want to ask what you mean by the
term 'children' ? I assume that you mean the processes spawned by
anacron, can you please confirm.
I do have anacron in init.d so suppose that this is operational. My
knowledge is sketchy, looks like anacron somehow makes the cron
things go daily/weekly/monthly as necessary soon after bootup as cron is
meant for machines that are on continually. I get about 3 days max
before a power blip switches it off so until I get another UPS I
tend to switch it off.
Thanks for your post.
Ian
--
Ian Balchin
http://www.imaginet.co.za/fables
This machine is running Debian GNU/Linux ... http://www.debian.org
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