ionice - Prioritize IO of Processes

By -

ionice is io bandwidth priority manipulation command. It supports three scheduling classes.

  • idle: In this class given process won't get disk access until no other process is accessing disk for certain period of time.
  • best-effort: This is default class.
  • realtime: Process with non-realtime classes have to wait until processes with realtime class to complete.

If you want to move some heavy stuff around when io sensitive applications like movie, audio players are active then its best to make a new bash process with idle class.

This is how you apply idle class to a bash process. Open up your terminal and give following command.

sudo ionice -c3 -p`echo $$`

Now what ever you execute in this terminal will inherit idle class and won't disturb your movie/audio players.

You can use ionice to make disk intensive corn jobs to behave well with io sensitive applications that you are using in the foreground.

Some useful ubuntuforums.org threads on ionice. Using ionice with updatedb.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Easy network traffic shaping on your ubuntu system

By -
Traffic shaping on Linux system used to require knowledge of lot of things like iptables, qdiscs & networking protocols. Things have changed and now there are couple of tools which handle all of this complexity without requiring much knowledge. And one of them is wondershaper . First install wondershaper by issuing following command. sudo apt-get -y install wondershaper Use following command template to make it work right away. sudo wondershaper <interface name> <down speed> <up speed> Where interface name is your network interface name like eth0 or eth1 or wifi0 and down speed , up speed are self explanatory and specified in kilo bits per second. So sample command will look like sudo wondershaper eth0 512 512 To disable wondershaper from controlling particular interface use following command. sudo wondershaper clear <interface name> To make these changes permanent add following lines to /etc/network/interfaces under relevant interface section.
Read more

Multi touch for any,all synaptics touchpad

By -
Multi-touch became trendy after iphone came up with it. We are seeing many new laptops with multi-touch. At hardware level, there is nothing special that you need, to make multi-touch work. You can also do two-finger scroll and two-finger tap to right/middle click. Also, three-finger tap, but, for me it is very hard to press three fingers at the same time(1 out of 10). Create new file gksudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi Paste the following code into the file and save it. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <deviceinfo version="0.2"> <device> <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.touchpad"> <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">synaptics</merge> <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge> <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateTwoFingerMinZ"
Read more

winetricks - install wine application perquisites with ease

By -
As most of us know wine is used to run windows applications on linux. But setting it up always has been pain. For example if your windows program requires some prerequisites that aren't shipped or not implemented in wine then you have to go for hunting on net. Examples include mscore fonts, Internet Explorer, DCOM, etc. And this guide explains how to install winetricks on ubuntu. Crossover office has a little wizard that will download install all the prerequisites of a particular software but It costs money to use. But there is one little known tool called winetricks which you can use to automate that stuff for free. Finally you can concentrate on something productive rather than hunting for some obscure stuff. Download winetricks Use following commands to get winetricks and set it up. wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks chmod +x winetricks Using winetricks For example if you want to install Microsoft Core fonts use following command. ./winetricks corefonts
Read more