Ubuntu Unleashed 2014 Edition: Covering 13.10 and 14.04,Ninth Edition

Limiting Resource Use

Computer systems run many processes at the same time. This is a good thing and allows users or multiple users to multitask. Some processes require more system resources than others. Occasionally, a resource-intensive process may take up or require so many resources that it slows down the system for other processes. There are ways to deal with this. This section describes a few of the basics. You must have admin privileges to perform any of the actions in this section.

You can set the priority for individual processes, to tell the kernel to either limit or give extra priority to a specific process. This is most useful when multiple concurrent processes are demanding more resources than are actually available, since this ...