At 4:57 PM -0500 11/17/2008, insightinmind wrote:
>Tiger 10.4.11.
>
>Any way to restrict cpu usage by an application like Firefox?

yes.  Change their niceness.

>myspace.com login page downloads a hog of a movie trailer and ads, 
>causes an 85% gobbling up of cpu ... on my poor little G4/400 Yikes! 
>... well, Yikes! Cannot even move away from it for awhile at times.

I have this problemo too, on my Smurf.  In general, the best solution 
is to block that annoying content.  There are a number of tools to do 
this, as Bruce mentions in his reply.

The alternative is to change the process' niceness.  This essentially 
de-prioritizes it a bit, so other processes can grab the cpu more 
often. The downside - Nicer processes become less responsive from the 
user's pov if there are other things running that want the cpu.

The nice value starts at 0, and has a range -20 to +20.  Less nice = 
increasing priority.

So, for example... if you want a process to be piggy when it needs, 
decrease its niceness to something like -5 (make it mean!).  If you 
want a process like Firefox to be nicer, increase its niceness.


To view all your processes and their niceness... use this command:

   ps -lAcU dan

(replace "dan" with your own username of course)

To change a process' niceness, use this command:

   sudo renice +5 pid

(replace "pid" with the numerical process id from the ps command).

I found a tool to do this, called BeNicer.  It works ok.  But I've 
found the shell commands are easier.

BeNicer
Tool to renice the priority of any process
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16534

Changing niceness has to be done from an admin account, btw...

HTH,
- Dan.
-- 
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth

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