uh311ae@sun7.lrz-muenchen.de (Henrik Klagges) (11/02/90)
Hello,
in his posting elvis@athena.ee.msstate.edu writes about the severe performance
degradation that occurs when his system is fully loaded. This is no surprise,
even on a multiple CPU engine 8).
If you specifically want to decrease the console response times or speed up
certain programs, however, there are some possibilities to do this.
- Start the appropriate processes with the "nice" command. As superuser, you
can run processes with higher priority - eg., your console csh.
- Attach the "sticky bit" to important programs (HANDLE WITH CARE !). This
keeps a programs image in core even if it is getting rescheduled. => no
swapping, but you can lock up your core quickly. This is done with
"chmod -1xxx. xfile." (xxx=755, or whatever you like).
- There is an undocumented feature in the /etc/passwd file. It allows you to
give any login a non-standard priority. So you could change ie. the priority
of the NeWS-Server itself, maybe. This works as follows:
Insert a "pri=<number>" into the start of the GCOS field in /etc/passwd. This
looks like this (cpcahil@virtech.UUCP):
root:GSDXoZZuPItTc:0:3:pri=-20-Admin(0000):/:/bin/csh
^^^^^^^
This gives root the highest possible user priority: 20(standard) -20 = 0.
Yours
Henrik Klagges
STM group at LMU Munich
uh311ae@sun7.lrz-muenchen.de OR @DM0LRZ01.BITNET