Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site entropy.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxb!mhuxn!mhuxm!mhuxj!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!entropy!hubert From: hubert@entropy.UUCP (Steve Hubert) Newsgroups: net.unix Subject: Priority shells, do they work? Message-ID: <131@entropy.UUCP> Date: Mon, 11-Feb-85 12:33:03 EST Article-I.D.: entropy.131 Posted: Mon Feb 11 12:33:03 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 13-Feb-85 01:45:16 EST Distribution: net Organization: UW MathStat, Seattle Lines: 24 We are thinking about implementing nice priorities at login. In other words, every user would have a base nice value assigned to the login shell and its children. We are running 4.2BSD and virtually everyone uses csh as their login shell. Has anyone tried this and does it work? I'm hoping that it would allow high priority users to use the machine whenever they want, lower priority users could use it only if there weren't a lot of high priority users (or could use it in slow mode with the high priority users) and so on. I don't know enough about the scheduling, paging, and swapping algorithms to know what the effect will be. Will it accomplish what I want without a lot of overhead or will it cause the system to thrash with lots of paging and swapping. We have a vax 750 with 2 RA81's on a single UDA50. 33MB of paging space on each disk. 3MB of memory, soon to be increased. The mix of jobs on the system is a lot of troff and TeX jobs, a lot of long running number crunchers, plus the usual edit jobs to go with them. Steve Hubert Dept. of Stat., U. of Wash, Seattle {allegra,decvax,ihnp4,ucbvax!lbl-csam}!uw-beaver!entropy!hubert hubert%entropy@uw-beaver