if this is a stupid q...

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Feb 21), Gary Kline said:
> Excuse me, butthis IS a stupid question.  I've tried to figure it out
> logically and by experimentation; just want to see if my findings jib with
> the unix wizards onlist.
> 
> Now/then i do a portupgrade; I probably should just cron this, but it has
> given me problems before, so I do it while I can monitor the run.
> 
> I'll do
> 
> # portupgrade -akOPv 
> 
> then go ahead and work on other things.   Question is What do I renice the
> run at [ruby] to set it to low at very low-power?  I've tried like -17 and
> +17 (or just 17) because I learned that nice'ing the prio level higher
> than 0 was giving it a lower prio.  Thus the rest of what I was doing
> could run anmost unaffected.  Sometimes I'll be running a vi or two with
> portupgrade the Only other thing running [compiling, usually], and my
> editing is extremely slow.

Output of vmstat or top during the slowdown might be useful here.  If editor
responsiveness is bad, you're either running dozens of cpu-hogging
processes, or running the system so far out of memory that your editor is
being swapped out while you're typing.  Certain ports may require a lot of
ram to build (the jdk*/openjdk* ports possibly), but none should launch more
processes than you have CPUs.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com