Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Using Priority Scheduling and Control

No process can make use of the system’s resources (CPU, memory, disk access, and so on) as it pleases. After all, the kernel’s primary function is to manage the system resources equitably. It does this by assigning a priority to each process so that some processes get better access to system resources and some processes might have to wait longer until their turn arrives. Priority scheduling can be an important tool in managing a system supporting critical applications or in a situation in which CPU and RAM usage must be reserved or allocated for a specific task. Two useful applications included with Ubuntu are the nice and renice commands. (nice is part of the GNU Coreutils package, and renice is inherited ...