"niced" processes on leopard

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Sep 11, 2009, at 2:29 PM, Toby Peterson wrote:
>> You can file a bug with Apple if you want to see something like a  
>> 'scavenge
>> class' for nice (or some way to mark a process so it only gets  
>> 'idle' or
>> otherwise unused CPU cycles)... maybe it will eventually be  
>> implemented.
>>
>> I don't have 10.6 yet, so I don't know how different it is (or  
>> seems to be),
>> but you haven't been able to nice things to work that way on any  
>> release of
>> Mac OS X (going back prior to 10.0, even).
>
> How many OSes even support this? Nice'ing a process just lowers its
> scheduling priority... obviously, it will still get scheduled.


linux has a 'batch' process class, and freebsd has an idle priority  
class (that sits below real-time and time-share-scheduled).

This would be useful for running something like the distributed.net  
client on a server. If you do it on an OS that supports it, it doesn't  
add much latency to 'real work', but on Mac OS X it always has.

I don't know of another situation where it would be useful (and for  
the vast majority of Mac OS X users, it probably makes more sense to  
let the computer do power saving instead of running something like  
that).
--
Daniel J. Luke
+========================================================+
| *---------------- dluke at geeklair.net ----------------* |
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