cpulimit - useful!

[Karl Auer]

On Fri, 2014-09-26 at 11:15 -0700, Bob wrote:
> > This is probably very old news for many, but I just found a nifty little
> > program for the first time: cpulimit.
> Would "nice" work?
> 
> From what I know I would think "nice" would work better as it would not slow
> down your converter unless something else is needing the cpu.
>
> > It doesn't seem clever enough to handle multiple simultaneous instances.
> "nice" would also handle this condition.

I'm old school,and familiar with "nice", so it was the first thing I
tried, but renicing even to very high values had no perceptible effect
on the CPU usage (as shown by "top"). I can't really explain why - but
"nice" works best when there are a lot of processes competing for the
CPU. Perhaps when there are only a few, or when the competing processes
are all CPU hungry, it's not so useful.

I'd be interested in a technical explanation of why nice didn't work
well in this case.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

GPG fingerprint: EC67 61E2 C2F6 EB55 884B E129 072B 0AF0 72AA 9882
Old fingerprint: B862 FB15 FE96 4961 BC62 1A40 6239 1208 9865 5F9A