From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jan 15 20:09:38 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 55A9DD5C for ; Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:09:38 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from yuri@rawbw.com) Received: from shell0.rawbw.com (shell0.rawbw.com [198.144.192.45]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1AD34314 for ; Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:09:37 +0000 (UTC) Received: from eagle.yuri.org (stunnel@localhost [127.0.0.1]) (authenticated bits=0) by shell0.rawbw.com (8.14.4/8.14.4) with ESMTP id r0FK9bHd009824 for ; Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:09:37 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from yuri@rawbw.com) Message-ID: <50F5B781.4070501@rawbw.com> Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:09:37 -0800 From: Yuri User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Thunderbird/17.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Is there a way to prioritize disk operations ? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:09:38 -0000 Currently one can set nice value to the process. But it only affects the CPU scheduling, so if this process is CPU bound it would yield to others. What if the process is disk-bound, like some backup operations? The backup copying large disk seriously affects performance of all other apps accessing the same disk. Is there a way to set the priority value on the process for the disk operations, so that all disk operations originating from the process will be scheduled in similar way how CPU is scheduled based on the nice value of the process? The disk-intense backup process with low disk priority won't affect the other processes at all. Yuri