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Date:      Tue, 25 May 1999 11:54:41 -0400 (EDT)
From:      "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>
To:        dpilgrim@uswest.net (Darren Pilgrim)
Cc:        doconnor@gsoft.com.au, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, crh@outpost.co.nz, mark@borg.com
Subject:   Re: SETI@home has teams now!
Message-ID:  <199905251554.LAA06918@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>
In-Reply-To: <374A8CD9.F399E3C2@uswest.net> from Darren Pilgrim at "May 25, 99 04:43:21 am"

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Darren Pilgrim wrote,
> Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> > 
> > On 25-May-99 Darren Pilgrim wrote:
> > >  On that note, is there are a way a put a limit on the load a process
> > >  creates under FreeBSD?  It would be great if I could leave S@h running
> > >  all the time under a load limit, then just lift that limit while I'm
> > >  not using the machine.
> > 
> > You can give it an idle priority (idprio) which basically means it is always
> > chosen last for CPU.
> 
> idprio seems to have the effect I was aiming for--there's hardly any
> performance hit on the rest of the system/software--but the load is
> considerably higher than I had wanted for running it during business
> hours.  I think idprio has a good chance of working.  Thanks.

Load does not tell you a whole lot about performance if processes are
prioritized appropriately. Who cares if setiathome is waiting for
processor cycles (adding to load), but not taking any time away from
processes in the "foreground" (not really impacting CPU usage of
work-related stuff)? Just because your load is always >1 when 
setiathome is quietly waiting to take otherwise unused CPU cycles does
not mean other processes are losing any.

That all said, I do kill setiathome during work hours (on work
machines). However, it has nothing to do with CPU usage. setiathome
eats about 14 MB of memory. On my 64 MB RAM PC here at work, that's
enough to cause some swapping, and _that_ can hit performance.
-- 
Crist J. Clark                           cjclark@home.com


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