Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: initscripts
The renice value for processes is set too high (20 for user level processes).
This makes the renice command useless for users. The nice value of all
processes should be 0 (or -2 for critical processes, 0 for user level
processes, or optionally
0 for X Window server, and 10 for user processes)-- but definitely not 20!
To see why, read the man page on the renice command, and see what a nice
value of 20 means. There is a nice range from -15 to 20, Why processes
are being assigned value of 15 and 20 is just plain silly and cripples
users ability to set priorities for their own processes without
resorting to sudo.
Discussion:
The renice command is essentially worthless to normal users because, by
default, the nice value is set at 20 for all user processes, and 15 for
most system processes. I discovered that when I wanted to set the nice
value of a process I was running to 20 (the lowest possible priority)
only to discover that would do no good because ALL of my processes had a
priority of 20.
Priority 20 should only be used for processes that can wait till the
system isn't busy to run. THIS SHOULD NOT INCLUDE X OR OTHER DESKTOP
APPLICATIONS. Something like an FTP, massive video conversions, etc,
would be something to assign to a nice value of 20.
The nice value has a range from -15 to 20. Critical system daemons
should be set to a negative nice value, user level processes should be
given a nice value of 0 (or, at most 10), and the rest be left up to the
user to decide if a process should be made more nice or not.
By setting the nice value to 20, some of the most powerful user-level
process controls are rendered worthless in that the user essentially has
no power to tell the system one of their own CPU intensive processes is
non-critical and it should allow other processes to take precedence over
execution (like, say, playing Unreal Tournament 2004, or Savage 2 while
waiting for a compile to finish or converting 4GB of raw video over to
h.264). A more practical example of how renice command would be useful
is a script that automagically sets the nice value for Flash processes
to 20 so that badly designed web pages (or flash ads) can't hog the CPU
from more important processes, like, say, the X Window interface. This
won't do anything useful if the default nice value of user processes is
already at 20.
Please fix this. This is the only Linux distribution I've seen that
broke the renice command for users. That's just pathetic. It also
explains why the desktop sometimes hangs during system intensive
processes.
** Affects: sysvinit (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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nice (renice) value too high
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/355879
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