IBM eServer Certification Study Guide - pSeries AIX System Administration

12.4. Controlling resource usage

The following sections describe various methods to limit the consumption of system resources.

12.4.1. Using the nice and renice commands

The nice and renice commands are used to change the priority of a process. The nice command runs another command at a different priority, while the renice command changes the priority of an already running process. The root user can increase or decrease the priority of any process. Other users can only decrease the priority of processes they own.

The following example shows the nice command running the cc command at a lower priority:

# nice -n 15 cc -c *.c

The following example shows the renice command lowering the priority of process ID 16304 by 5:

 # renice -n 5 16304  ...