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From: george@vax2.ccs.cornell.edu (George R Boyce)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: process priority levels
Message-ID: <390@vax1.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 15-Jun-87 12:11:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: vax1.390
Posted: Mon Jun 15 12:11:07 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jun-87 05:21:24 EDT
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Reply-To: george@vax2.ccs.cornell.edu (George R Boyce)
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Organization: Cornell Computer Service, Ithaca NY
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In setting up a resource accounting system, I want to consider the
feature of allowing a user to select a lower process priority, say
3 instead of the default 4, in exchange for being charged a lower
rate. So two questions...

1) Will VMS schedule jobs at two priority levels "fairly" or will the
lower priority jobs never get reasonable response? I know the answer
depends heavily on what job mix we have, so I guess I want to know
if anyone has set up their system to divide their users into two or
more priority classes. (I'm running an 8500 with mostly student
users, a few large SAS or MACSYMA users.)

2) Is their a way to set a process priority limit downward such that
the user can't set it back? The documentation for SET PROCESS/PRIORITY
and SYS$SETPRI seem to be misleading. It suggests that the user can't
set the base priority higher than the existing base priority when in 
fact they can set it back to the former (uaf specified) value. It looks
like I would have to poke around in a system data structure; does anyone
know how to do it? Thanks.

George Boyce, Academic Computing, Cornell University
george@vax2.ccs.cornell.edu (128.84.252.100), george@crnlvax2.bitnet