Problem with nice

[Steve Van Gorder]

I have several problems with nice and related things.

1. The default increment for nice on my machine seems to be 4 instead of 10
as the manual says. i.e. "nice command" executes command with a nice
value of 24 while  "command" executes with nice=20.

2. "nice -increment command" does nothing at all for any value of increment.
 Its nice value is always 20 !

A question about npri.

I was under the impression from previous discussions in this news group
and from reading the manuals that if I type  "npri -h 250 -p pid" as superuser
then this process would be assigned a "non-degrading" priority of 250. 
According to schedctl(2) man page this means that it is of lower priority than
all other processes and shouldn't interfere with ANY interactive job.

It doesn't seem to work that way to me at all.  In particular the window
manager can become almost totally usless if there are even few jobs running
in background ... and even if they have been "NPRIed" into oblivion.

Shouldn't I ALWAYS see +250 as the priority in the process status table ? 
... Because sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. These jobs still change
priorities like all the other processes do.

Anyway help with these questions will be appreciated.

I have a 4D/20 with 8 meg ram running 3.2
--
Steve VanGorder                                steve at chaos.ocean.fsu.edu
Dept. of Oceanography                               (128.186.3.34)
Florida State University                       gorder at fsu.bitnet
Tallahassee, Fl 32306  (904)644-2447