renice

[Mark H. Colburn]

In article <62 at utower.UUCP> fischer at utower.UUCP (Axel Fischer) writes:
>It's resets the priority of a process to a lower priority if the process
>runs longer than n minutes. n is configurable in the Makefile.
>So the machine is not to busy with the single process.
>(Maybe 2,3,4 ... minutes or whatever)

I think that you will find that you are just duplicating work.

The kernel already does this.  It does not adjust the visible nice value,
but there is a kernel internal interpretation of "priority" which is
adjusted by the kernel.  The nice value is used to help compute the
priority, as is run time.  Processes which run for a very long time have
their priority adjusted downward.  In order to keep processes from being
locked out on the swap device, processes which have not been in run-state
for a while will have their priorities adjusted upwards so that they can
get to run every once in a while.

If you are interested, a good book to read about this stuff is "The design
of the Unix Operating System" by Maurice Bach.

-- 
Mark H. Colburn                          mark at jhereg.mn.org
Minnetech Consulting, Inc.