joey@reed.UUCP (Joe Pruett) (02/19/85)
I've been wondering why we couldn't add a field into a.out headers that would set the default niceness of a process. It would be very useful for binary only systems, or systems where you don't want to recompile a program just to change a programs niceness. Good examples would be rogue, compress, news-batching, uuxqt, etc. One can cheat and put a frontend shell file that does a "nice +10 rogue", but I find this very un-UNIX. What do you people out in the "real world" think? Respond to the net if you think this is worthy of major discussion. Otherwise, send me mail. Joe Pruett Reed College ...!tektronix!reed!joey
gwyn@Brl-Vld.ARPA (VLD/VMB) (02/23/85)
Trying to override the automatic scheduler mechanisms by setting "nice" levels etc. can actually degrade performance. Also, not all UNIX schedulers work identically and most are not very good under heavy load.
jas@rtech.ARPA (Jim Shankland) (02/28/85)
> I've been wondering why we couldn't add a field into a.out headers that > would set the default niceness of a process.... One can cheat and put a > frontend shell file that does a "nice +10 rogue", but I find this very > un-UNIX. > > Joe Pruett > Reed College > ...!tektronix!reed!joey On the contrary, I'd say it's very much in the UNIX style to use existing tools (such as nice(1)) where they work well. If your one-line shell script says "exec nice +10 rogue", there is even very little extra overhead compared with building a nice value into the object header. Jim Shankland ..!ihnp4!pegasus!rtech!jas ..!ucbvax!mtxinu!rtech!jas