Process Priorities with nice, renice, and Signals
Control how much CPU processes get using nice and renice, and learn how signals let you communicate with running processes beyond just killing them.
Beyond Starting and Stopping
You already know how to view processes with ps/top and stop them with kill. But sometimes a process should simply run more politely so it does not starve others of CPU.
That is what nice and renice are for.
What Is a Niceness Value?
Every process has a niceness from -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest priority). A nicer process yields CPU to others. Default is 0.
All lessons in this course
- Understanding Processes: `ps`, `top`, `htop`
- Managing Processes: `kill`, `bg`, `fg`
- Monitoring System Resources: `df`, `du`, `free`
- Process Priorities with nice, renice, and Signals