FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Making Processes “Nice”

The kill command is one of the process-management tools that you can use both from the command line and within top. You read earlier of another tool, though, that you can use to alter a process’s scheduling priority. This tool is the renice command, which alters the priority (or “nice” level) of any currently running process.

The scheduling priority is an integer value between -20 and 20, with -20 being the highest possible priority (confusingly enough). Take a look at top; the values in the NICE column are the priorities of each process. Notice that most processes have a priority of 0. Zero priority is the default because, in most circumstances, you don’t need to specify any particular priority. Still, certain services ...