auto-niceing processes?

[Chuq Von Rospach]

Has anyone out there done any work on setting up certain processes so that
they automatically nice themselves? I know it can be done by adding
hardcoded nice() calls to a program and recompiling, but that doesn't seem
elegant to me -- it also doesn't allow you to deal with programs you don't
have control of the source. 

I've looked at it, and I see two reasonable possibilities:

    o When something is put into the background, either by csh or sh, it is
    given a reduced priority. They would also need to be taught to return it
    to zero if it was brought back into the foreground which could get
    tricky.

    o Add a field to the a.out header that gives the program its nice
    value, with a default of zero. When the binary is exec()ed, it's
    niceness is set to whatever is in that field. A program would have
    to be written to modify that field in a binary as well, but it
    shouldn't be a lot of trouble (he says, blithely...)

The problem we're running into is simply large amounts of development
going on -- yesterday I found that we had 15 makes and a troff running
simultaneously, and only two of the makes were niced. Even on a 780, this
makes using emacs, vi, or even logging out relatively painful. What I want
to do is give the foreground, terminal based processes priority without
having to manually keep an eye on things...

chuq
-- 
:From the carousel of the autumn carnival:        Chuq Von Rospach
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