~ overflow ~

It’s odd, but I though that the higher the nice number was higher was the priority of a process, turns out that I was wrong, it’s the inverse.

Example: Priority 20 is the default lowest priority, while 0 is the normal priority. There’s also negative values to force a higher priority.

Besides the priority values, I haven’t found anything about cpu affinity, however, I didn’t tried hard, since the machine I’m running linux is single core anyway.

Problem:

I have this shares between my linux and windows machine, they use samba. Eventually, eg. when i’m listening to music, it stop working for a while, i see a cpu peak on top then when it drops song resumes playing.

Solution:

It looks like some other process is taking the whole cpu (not a big deal since this machine is old and slow) but like on windows (argh) you can control process priorities on linux, a simple renice did the work.

for running processes:

renice <priority value>  -p <pid>

for new processes:

nice -n <priority value>  <command>

Sources:

NixTutor