Nice

[Ray Davis]

In <1991Jan22.184055.3641 at demott.com> kdq at demott.com (Kevin D. Quitt) writes:

>    I am running a cpu-bound, small program (15 pages of memory), on our
>SYSV system.  The startup is automated at boot time, and the program is
>niced.  Is it reasonable to expect that I should see little or no system
>response-time degradation, or is the UNIX scheduler really that hosed?

It completely depends on your machine, how it is set up and the
load.  For instance, is your machine a PC/AT with one less than
a mip cpu and 1 meg of memory, or a Convex C240 with four ~50 mip 
cpus and 1 Gigabyte or memory?  Also, what is this processed niced
to?  If it is niced negative then it will have a higher priority.

If it is cpu bound, then it will always use it's whole time-slice,
which most processes under unix don't do.  This might at times
degrade response-time, because if the proc gets the cpu, then it
won't give it up as soon as other procs might.

--Ray