On Thu, Aug 04, 2011 at 10:28:01AM -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > On 8/4/2011 9:40 AM, lina wrote: > > On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Robert Baron > > <robertbartlettbaron@gmail.com> wrote: > >> have you tried adding an '&' to the tasks you think can be run in > >> parallel (as in running them in the background (ie 'mycmd myargs &'))? > > > > Thanks, > > > > "&" is cool. > > now is fully running, but, there is another thing slow it down, the > > nice level is 19. why is it so high? are there some root's setting? > > Nice levels can be deceiving to those who don't understand how kernel > scheduling works. For example, it is possible, and happens all the time > really, that a program with a nice level of 19 will fully consume 100% > of a processor's time until the program completes. > > The only time nice comes into play is when scheduling contention exists. > This only occurs when there are more ready-to-run processes/threads > than available processor time slice slots. On an 8 processor desktop > with the default 1000Hz scheduler you have 8,000 scheduling slices per > second. So unless your system has 8,001 ready to run processes every > second, that nice level 19 process will get all the CPU time it needs. > > Nice is a relic of early UNIX when businesses and universities would > have dozens to hundreds of concurrent users on serial TTY terminals > running programs on a shared single processor machine. Nice allowed > administrators to provide "fair" access to all users, or to make sure a > critical batch job got the cycles it needed, even with many users > running their programs. On today's multi-core desktops, nice is > literally irrelevant. This is actually the case for most business > UNIX/Linux systems as well, as almost all of them have excess processor > capacity for their actual workloads. I wouldn't say that nice is completely irrelevant. I run BOINC on my desktop machine and rely on the BOINC tasks having more nice (if I can take the opportunity to butcher English) than other tasks such as the web browser, the window manager and so on. Doing so also allows me to tell my CPU scheduler to ignore niced processes and only spin up the CPU to full speed when an important task wants it (as opposed to always running at full speed doing the BOINC calculations). -- Paul Saunders
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