How-to reprio gcc (by default)?

[Gary Kline]

	Guys,

	This may grab some interest from those running dog-slow servers
	and using a GUI env.  (Gotta fess up and admit it took me a
	couple years in the late 80's before I would touch Sun's NeWS.
	Then I  got hooked on using multiple xterms; the rest is history.)

	Unless I'm having severe delusions, by tweaking the NICE
	priorities on a bunch on std and added binaries, on my 400MHz.
	Kayak (with gnome-lite), I'm getting good performance.  Later 
	this year (or whenever hands can help me rob my junk Kayak's
	memory) I'll boost the SRAM from 192 to 512MB.   That ought to 
	allow me to run even more smoothly.  

	The tuning so far has been done entirely by-hand.  One example is
	setting the sendmail priority from a nice of 0 down to 7. I've
	nice'd xload down to 20; increased firefox to -17, and so forth.  
	top runs very well niced at 19 with "-s5".  And it does keep the
	5-second update fairly well.   I don't care about knowing what
	the system is doing every second (or default two seconds).  But
	it's nice to know how things are generally going.  ....So now for
	some questions: I'm thinking of writing a script that, once it
	know that X is running (and gnome/kde/<<whatever>> is in the
	table) will re-nice everything to my tastes.  Is there any way of
	setting things to run at a lower or higher nice value, other than
	by-hand or by-script?  Since I'm not that concerned with having a
	port built in K minutes or N hours (or M days :-(), can I set gcc
	down to 5 or 7 or whatever value?   Any kernel hackers or *real*
	sysadmins who can clue me in?

	If my backup server is still running in a few month, I'll write
	up an article on "system tuning" and put it on my BSD site.

	thanks for any/all thoughts,

	gary



-- 
  Gary Kline  kline at thought.org   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix