Process priority hijinks

[GJones]

This is a screenshot of htop on an EeePC running Zenwalk 7.0:

http://i.imgur.com/1HCcF.png

And this is one of htop on an Aspire laptop running Lucid Puppy 5.2.8:

http://i.imgur.com/EZUEr.png

Note the PRI column. On Zenwalk, most tasks have a priority of 1, and it is usually not higher than 7. On Puppy, almost all tasks have a priority of 20, and it usually does not go below 16 (except for the slmodem driver, which has realtime priority). It looks like almost everything desktop-related has much *lower* priority than on a normal Linux distro.

Kind of weird... Anyone know what produces these conditions in Puppy?

[darkcity]

looks like different default priorities have been set

you can make a app have priority by running it with the nice command with negative value
for example

Code: Select all

nice --10 proteus

[GJones]

Thank you, but it looks like the nice command does not work that way?

Also, the niceness of the processes is normal in both cases, it's just the priority that's different. Not sure if/how that makes sense.

[Karl Godt]

Kind of weird... Anyone know what produces these conditions in Puppy?

Nothing produces this on Puppy , seems that zenwalk adds lines of code to adjust the priorities .

Otherwise have a look in " man ps " for more info :

nice value. This ranges from 19 (nicest) to -20 (not nice
to others), see nice(1). (alias nice).

[GJones]

D'oh! Thanks for correcting me on that.