Process scheduling - how does it work.

[gregg.g.wonderly]

>From article <8908150138.AA24829 at garnet.berkeley.edu>, by rusty at GARNET.BERKELEY.EDU:
> Remember that niceness only affects things when more than 1 process is
> running (R under the STAT column from the output of ps; all the others
> don't count for the most part).  If only 1 process is running and it's
> at nice 20 it runs at full spead (i.e., it gets 100% of the cpu).

If only one process is running at any nice, it gets 100% of the CPU.  The
nice value appears to be set by your shell.  Several versions of the
Bourne/C/Korn shells have added the automated (some are setable) nicing
of processes when the '&' is used to start them up in the background.
For a quick try at a solution, try

	sh -c 'old-command'

which will run that command under the bourne shell instead.  I used this
on a system with the C-shell where I did not want 'nohup' in effect for a
process that I started in the background.

-- 
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gregg.g.wonderly at att.com   (AT&T bell laboratories)