[kde-linux] nice

[James Richard Tyrer]

mark walker wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Thanks for the reply.
> 
> I appreciate all your security comments, but they don't apply in my 
> situation.
> 
> No user has interactive access to run any commands let alone the nice
>  command.
> 
> The exact situation is so..
> 
> Most average users just access OpenOffice on a daily basis via
> dedicated usernames that only allow OpenOffice to run.  Most of the
> time system performance is OK. However, I have 30 to 40 custom built
> database analysis programs that run twice daily.  When these programs
> are running the system performs very slow. In order to help with
> performance the databases analysis programs are run with nice -19,

You need to run the background programs with nice of +19.  Is that what
you are doing?

> but this only marginally improves performance. In testing I've found
> that running OpenOffice with nice --20 really helps, but I have to
> use sudo nice --20 so that the OpenOffice user has privildges to the
> nice command.  Using sudo makes OpenOffice run as user ROOT not the 
> original user, which makes tracking who's using OpenOffice and who
> created which documents very very difficult.
> 
> How can I run OpenOffice with nice --20 but as the original user not
> ROOT ??
> 
> Also I've changed the min-timeslice & max-timeslice kernel parameters
> to 1000 & 30000 as recommended by Suse for interactive use.  Any
> comment on these settings for other kernel/system parameters that
> might help improve system performance.

Some systems run X with a nice of -10.  OTOH, some think that this is a 
bad idea.  In theory, this will increase the performance of all GUI 
based apps.

-- 
JRT