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Date:      Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:52:02 -0700
From:      Garrett Cooper <youshi10@u.washington.edu>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: How-to reprio gcc  (by default)?
Message-ID:  <4600C802.1010105@u.washington.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20070321043911.GA68447@thought.org>
References:  <20070321003056.GA66954@thought.org>	<460088FA.6050703@u.washington.edu> <20070321043911.GA68447@thought.org>

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Gary Kline wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 06:23:06PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> Gary Kline wrote:
>>> 	Guys,
>>>
>>> 	This may grab some interest from those running dog-slow servers
>>> 	and using a GUI env.  (Gotta fess up and admit it took me a
>>> 	couple years in the late 80's before I would touch Sun's NeWS.
>>> 	Then I  got hooked on using multiple xterms; the rest is history.)
>>>
>>> 	Unless I'm having severe delusions, by tweaking the NICE
>>> 	priorities on a bunch on std and added binaries, on my 400MHz.
>>> 	Kayak (with gnome-lite), I'm getting good performance.  Later 
>>> 	this year (or whenever hands can help me rob my junk Kayak's
>>> 	memory) I'll boost the SRAM from 192 to 512MB.   That ought to 
>>> 	allow me to run even more smoothly.  
>>>
>>> 	The tuning so far has been done entirely by-hand.  One example is
>>> 	setting the sendmail priority from a nice of 0 down to 7. I've
>>> 	nice'd xload down to 20; increased firefox to -17, and so forth.  
>>> 	top runs very well niced at 19 with "-s5".  And it does keep the
>>> 	5-second update fairly well.   I don't care about knowing what
>>> 	the system is doing every second (or default two seconds).  But
>>> 	it's nice to know how things are generally going.  ....So now for
>>> 	some questions: I'm thinking of writing a script that, once it
>>> 	know that X is running (and gnome/kde/<<whatever>> is in the
>>> 	table) will re-nice everything to my tastes.  Is there any way of
>>> 	setting things to run at a lower or higher nice value, other than
>>> 	by-hand or by-script?  Since I'm not that concerned with having a
>>> 	port built in K minutes or N hours (or M days :-(), can I set gcc
>>> 	down to 5 or 7 or whatever value?   Any kernel hackers or *real*
>>> 	sysadmins who can clue me in?
>>>
>>> 	If my backup server is still running in a few month, I'll write
>>> 	up an article on "system tuning" and put it on my BSD site.
>>>
>>> 	thanks for any/all thoughts,
>>>
>>> 	gary
>> Gary,
>> 	Seems like /etc/login.conf is the winner if you're looking into 
>> 	setting the global priority to something a bit lower :).. but if everything 
>> runs at the same priority won't all your processes be slow at the same 
>> speed :)?
> 
> 	Never thought of login.conf, Garrett... hmm.  Won't everything be
> 	slow? No; I use different prio levels for different processes.
> 	E.g., experimentally, sendmail is at +7 for now, firefox is at 
> 	-9, "X" is -11, most of the rest are from +5 to +20.  I changed 
> 	"something" last night (one of several processes I reniced) and
> 	suddenly my response time was greatly improved.  ...So, if I
> 	can run gXX at some default lower priority (without having to 
> 	renice every compile!) that might make for a more stable
> 	environment.  Like I said, it'll probably be months.  
> 
> 	Another aim is to get gcc-4.x going and run some tests with loops
> 	of varying complexity with gcc3.x; then with 4.x.
> 
> 	I've got another system-tuning question, but in a separate post 
> 	in a day or three....  
> 
> 	gary
> 
>> -Garrett

Well, things can be organized under different classes, so you can 
properly prioritize your daemon processes and/or create certain special 
classes for compiling packages and run it as that specific class, etc.

Unfortunately outside of writing scripts, or aliasing commands, there's 
nothing much you can do in terms of "personalized nice'ing" (at least 
none that I know of).

Cheers!
-Garrett



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