Priority shells, do they work?

[Dennis L. Mumaugh]

Yes you can setup login to give a set of priorities to users.  On a system
many years ago we had the default nice as 2 set in the code of login just
before we ran the user's shell.  Then we set some programs such as cc and n/troff
to a nice of 3 and the editors [RAND and VI] to a nice of 1.  You
can do some sort of variation on that.  If you assign a different
nice to a given user, then the changes to n/troff, cc and the editors need
to calculate a "relative" change to the current nice.

Warning: small changes to nice can have powerful effect.  We niced a program
at 5 once and it took 6 hours to run.


Dennis Mumaugh
Computer Systems Center
Lisle, Illinois