How to permanently set higher process priority in GUI

Nils Kassube kassube at gmx.net
Mon Jul 20 09:18:38 UTC 2015


Tony Baechler - BATS wrote:
> The only reason why I thought increasing
> the priority might help is that it seems to make a difference on the
> command line.  On the server, I installed the schedtool package and I
> usually do something like this as root:
> 
> schedtool -2 -p99 -e ffmpeg "$@"
> 
> By giving it the highest process and I/O priority, I can convert a 30
> minute video in about 5 minutes (yes, I've timed it).  Again, that's
> with 32 GB of memory and 8 CPU cores which obviously makes a
> difference.

I'm not familiar with shedtool, so I don't know if there is a 
significient difference to my use of nice --19.

> Just as another random thought, would using a low latency kernel make
> any difference?  It seemed to help slightly on the server.

Usually I don't need too much of the resources of my machine. Therefore 
I never tried a low latency kernel.

> Thanks for doing your experiment.  I've found that even with nice -19,
> it still isn't at the highest priority which is why I installed
> schedtool.  At least this confirms that my idea was wrong and
> wouldn't have worked anyway.

Well, your nice -19 gives the lowest priority, not the highest. Anyway, 
during the transcoding I watched the output of top, which showed between 
170% and 195% CPU activity for avconv with both nice levels. And I don't 
think that the I/O activity had much influence on the timing because the 
disk LED was off most of the time.


Nils





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