Self-renicing emerge

Posted Mar 8, 2007 14:35 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: The Rotating Staircase Deadline Scheduler by jospoortvliet
Parent article: The Rotating Staircase Deadline Scheduler

Although it's not currently on by default, emerge will already renice itself if you set the PORTAGE_NICENESS variable in /etc/make.conf. I do this so that an emerge doesn't kill system performance.

I've not prodded Debian for a while, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a similar setting for apt/dpkg.

Self-renicing emerge

Posted Mar 8, 2007 19:46 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

Apt and dpkg are not, in general, CPU bound, but I/O bound. Nicing I/O bound processes generally causes more problems than it solves, because you end up blowing the file cache.