Your message to get_iplayer awaits moderator approval

[Stuart Henderson]

On 2014/11/09 13:18, Alan Milewczyk wrote:
> On 09/11/2014 11:18, C E Macfarlane wrote:
> >True, you can do that, but ...
> >
> >1)	It is mainly the calling of external programs that causes stuttering to
> >other processes
> >
> >2)	I often forget to start get_iplayer with nice, and it's nice to have the
> >fallback position of the worst offenders being controlled anyway.

I don't think it really needs support in get_iplayer itself, taking that
approach you'd end up with duplicated code all over the place for everything
that might take high system resources, and that just hasn't happened.

How about this in .profile?

alias get_iplayer="nice -19 get_iplayer"

External processes will inherit the "nice" value of the parent.

> >>     If you want that, why wouldn't you just start get_iplayer
> >>     with nice anyway?
> >>
> >>     i.e. nice -19 get_iplayer ....
> You and a few others have mentioned "nice" in the last few days. I've never
> heard of it before. What is it and what are its benefits?

It runs a process at a lowered (or elevated) priority. If you have a
lower-importance process starving out more important ones on a machine.
it will give hints to the OS scheduler as to what's important.