FreeBSD® Unleashed

Making Processes “Nice”

We discussed one of the process-management tools that you can use both from the command line and within top, which is the kill command. There was another tool we mentioned, though, which was a way to alter a process' priority; this is the renice command, which alters the priority (or “nice” level) of any currently running process.

The scheduling priority is an integer value between -20 and 20, with -20 being the highest possible priority. Take a look at top; the values in the NICE column are the priorities of each process. Notice that most processes have a priority of zero; this is the default because, in most circumstances, you don't need to specify any particular priority. Still, certain services run at predefined “ ...