Re: process in background

[Matyas Sustik <debian.list@sustik.com>]

Some more data as suggested.  I run without nice, with nice -n 5 and nice -n
10, each version twice:

Without nice:
real    0m10.662s
user    0m9.513s
sys     0m3.448s

real    0m10.121s
user    0m7.712s
sys     0m2.444s

CPU% according to top reached 118%.


nice -n 5:
real    0m22.141s
user    0m27.202s
sys     0m1.444s

real    0m21.855s
user    0m28.674s
sys     0m2.468s

CPU% according to top reached 147%.


nice -n 10:
real    0m21.638s
user    0m26.878s
sys     0m1.268s

real    0m21.654s
user    0m27.090s
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
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Every hardware eventually breaks.  Every software eventually works.