[Popcon-developers] Bug#483465: popularity-contest: cronjob should use ionice

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Franklin PIAT]
> Yep, it's less intrusive, however, "ionice -p" doesn't seems to be
> propagated to existing child process :

I know, and that is OK, as long as it is executed early in the script,
before child processes are forked.

>> It change the nice level on the script process.  Btw, why did you
>> choose class 2 (best-effort) instead of class 3 (idle)?
> 
> ???The class 3 (idle) can lead to deadlocks[1]. (I think there were some
> improvements in recent kernels).

Ah, good to know.  

>> I thought class 2 was the default, thus making the operation a no-op?
> You are right... I usually run "nice ionice -c2 foobar" (which works).
> Maybe we should do that... or use "ionice -c2 -n7"

If -c2 already is the default, it would be a no-op, and I see be no
reason to call it for the popcon scripts.  The '-n7' argument might
have some effect, but with -c2 it would raise the priority of the
process, not lowering it, if I understand ionice correctly.  Yet
again, I fail to understand why you would like to use the arguments
you propose.  Care to elaborate?

Bill suggested this should be done in cron, and not in each cronjob.
What is your view on this?  Why should it be fixed here and not in
crond?

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen