how can i limit system resources for a particular process? [solved]

[Jordi Moles Blanco]

hi,

thanks for the advice, that worked great, it's what i was looking for.

Jordi.

En/na Nils Kassube ha escrit:
> Jordi Moles Blanco wrote:
>   
>> let's say i want to create an .img file of 50GB with "dd" command.
>> After that, i will give it a format with mkfs.ext3.
>>
>> The problem is that while "dd" is running I'm not able to do anything
>> else on the machine, not even ssh in, it just consumes all the
>> available resources, and as I'm creating a 50GB image, i can't access
>> the machine for several minutes.
>>
>> I've tried to use "nice" command, giving the "dd" process the lowest
>> possible priority, 19. The thing is that the whole thing performs
>> better, i can establish ssh connection. However, i can't do much when
>> I'm in it, everything is so slow.
>>     
>
> Try the ionice command. In your case the problem is the constant write 
> access to the disk. If you want to limit disk access to times where no 
> other process wants to use the disk, it would be a command like this:
>
> ionice -c3 dd if=/dev/zero of=filename.img bs=10M count=5000
>
> You can even combine it with nice like
>
> nice -19 ionice -c3 dd if=/dev/zero of=filename.img bs=10M count=5000
>
> but I don't think that is necessary.
>
>
> Nils
>
>
>