Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!CHAOS.OCEAN.FSU.EDU!steve
From: steve@CHAOS.OCEAN.FSU.EDU (Steve Van Gorder)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Problem with Nice
Message-ID: <9008211446.AA13953@chaos.ocean.fsu.edu>
Date: 21 Aug 90 14:46:02 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 27


Thanks to all who responded to my "nice" problem, especially Martin Knoblaunch
who pointed out that the nice man page assumes one is using sh and Paul 
Mielke who has fixed this man page and cleared up whats going on with the
non-degrading priorities.

The best solution I've found so far to my immediate problem (of background jobs
causing the window manager to become unuseable) is to simply suspend the 
offending jobs using blockproc(2) untill I go home.  (hey its my machine !!)
This was pointed out by Reinhard Doelz in an earlier discussion in this news
group.

Another thing that seems to help somewhat is to use npri to set the nice value
of the news_ser all the way to 0. This seems to keep the window manager from
being paged out quite so easily and works a little better than assigning it 
a non-degrading priority, I suppose since the highest available non-
degrading priority is 30 whereas as news_ser normaly has a priority of 26.

I will be very interested to see how the setrlimit facility mentioned by
Paul Mielke works in 3.3.

Most importantly, we do have additional memory in the works as suggested by
several people.

Thanks again,
--
     Steve VanGorder