nice not nice enough with ULE

[Don Lewis]

I'm seeing the following during the java library building phase of the
lang/gcc33 port:


last pid: 41215;  load averages:  3.82,  3.60,  3.53    up 0+05:39:11  17:53:43
67 processes:  4 running, 63 sleeping
CPU states:  1.5% user, 78.2% nice, 20.3% system,  0.0% interrupt,  0.0% idle
Mem: 72M Active, 624M Inact, 125M Wired, 37M Cache, 111M Buf, 139M Free
Swap: 2055M Total, 2055M Free

  PID USERNAME   PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
  531 setiathome 139   15 16692K 15888K RUN    195:45 75.00% 75.00% setiathome
18973 dl          76    0  2200K  1328K RUN      0:41  0.00%  0.00% top
  508 uucp         5    0  1264K   924K ttyin    0:35  0.00%  0.00% newapc
  582 dl          76    0  6004K  2296K select   0:10  0.00%  0.00% sshd
92710 root         8    0 11616K 10596K wait     0:08  0.00%  0.00% gmake
19272 root         8    0 12456K 11980K wait     0:07  0.00%  0.00% ruby
98135 root         8    0  9676K  8568K wait     0:06  0.00%  0.00% gmake
19274 root        -8    0  1124K   520K piperd   0:05  0.00%  0.00% tee
  510 uucp        76    0  1240K   888K select   0:04  0.00%  0.00% upsd
18955 dl          76    0  6004K  2320K RUN      0:03  0.00%  0.00% sshd
  514 uucp         8    0  1244K   920K nanslp   0:02  0.00%  0.00% upsmon
 7129 root        76    0  1204K   784K select   0:02  0.00%  0.00% script
  430 root        76    0  1516K  1020K select   0:02  0.00%  0.00% ntpd
16600 dl           4    0  1152K   664K kqread   0:01  0.00%  0.00% tail
  461 root        76    0  3252K  2056K select   0:01  0.00%  0.00% sendmail
35166 dl           8    0  1188K   868K nanslp   0:01  0.00%  0.00% vmstat


The port build is running at nice 0, but setiathome at nice 15 is
getting 75% of the CPU.  Something unusual about this phase of the port
build is that it is using libtool, which must spawn a lot of processes,
because "last pid" in increasing by about 30 to 40 per second.  The port
build should be pretty close to CPU bound because I see very litle disk
I/O.

When larger files are compiled so that individual processes hang around
for a longer period of time, I see setiathome drop down to about 11% of
the CPU.

The machine in question is has a single Athlon XP processor and is
running rev 1.98 of sched_ule.c.