Hello all,

the load on the login-server (nightshade) is quite high at the moment. One of the problems, that cause this, is that people don't use nice. The nice-level tells an operation system how important a program is and how much cpu-power it should get (to simplify it). Normal user can set a nice-level between 0 and 19. 0 is the highest, 19 the lowest value. The default is 0. Longrunning tasks like bots should use a low nice-level like 10. The usage is quite easy. Just put a "nice -n 10" before your command. An example would be

nice -n 10 python redirect.py broken

which runs the program python (that executes the redirect-script) at nice-level 10.

More details tell the man-page of nice (man nice).

Because I know that a few of you (of corse only new users ;)) will forget that, I wrote a little program today. The program searchs for long-running, high-cpu-time-using programs with nice-level 0 and set nice-level 19 by force (then it sends an eMail to inform the user). At the moment, the programm runs in test-mode; that means it sets only a nice-level of 1 and sends an email. If you receive such an email and think that it is wrong, please message me.

Thanks for your attention :).

Sincerly, DaB.