Change the priorities of linux processes with nice and renice
Last Updated on Wednesday, 21 July 2010 14:06
Every process running on the linux system has a default priourity assined which tells the the system how much proccessing power should be deticated to each particular process. It is possible to change this priority value with nice or renice command. Here is a small example: Let's say that we have a very simple bash script which prints date and time to the file 1000 times.
#!/bin/bash for i in $(seq 1 1000); do date >> date.txt;sleep 1; done
Save this script and make it executable with chmod command. Execute the script:
$ nice -n 00 ./date &
By executing a ./date script with nice -19 command we gave the date.sh very high priority as the priority range is from -20 ( higest ) to 19 ( lowest ). to confirm the priority run ps -l command from the same terminal.
F S UID PID PPID C PRI NI ADDR SZ WCHAN TTY TIME CMD 0 S 1000 3670 2940 0 80 0 - 1196 - pts/2 00:00:00 bash 0 S 1000 6665 3670 0 90 10 - 1111 - pts/2 00:00:00 date.sh 0 S 1000 6697 6665 0 90 10 - 754 - pts/2 00:00:00 sleep
as you can see date command and sleep command has same priority 10. However sleep running inside a date.sh is a child process of date.sh and date.sh is a parent process of sleep. At this stage we can try to change the priority to some othre value with renice command and with use a PID ( Proccess Identification Number ):
$ renice 15 -p 6655 6665: old priority 10, new priority 15
The command above will change nice value from 10 to 15. to confirm priority value:
F S UID PID PPID C PRI NI ADDR SZ WCHAN TTY TIME CMD 0 S 1000 3670 2940 0 80 0 - 1198 - pts/2 00:00:00 bash 0 S 1000 6665 3670 0 95 15 - 1113 - pts/2 00:00:00 date.sh 0 S 1000 7109 6665 0 95 15 - 754 - pts/2 00:00:00 sleep
NOTE: With a non-super user account you can change priorities only for the processes you own, assign priorities only in range of 0 - 19 and you can only increase a nice value. root user can change any process to any priority nice value. Another way to change priorit values is to use top command and r key.
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