I think that 'priority' and 'interactivity' are two separate things and it's a mistake to use
a single niceness level for both.
My bash process shouldn't have a high priority if it starts chewing CPU time for long periods,
but it needs to respond quickly to user input and then go back to sleep.
Posted Jul 3, 2008 15:28 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
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I had a boss a while ago who liked to lecture on the difference between "urgent" and
"important". Not everything which is important needs attention right away, and there are some
things which need to be responded to quickly but which aren't, in the big picture, as
important. In this case, your bash prompt is urgent, but isn't necessarily as important as a
background application.