Re: Niced cron jobs

[Nicolás Lichtmaier <nick@debian.org>]

> it doesn't matter. if there is no CPU available for nice -10 tasks
> because the machine is too busy then there is no CPU available for nice
> -9 or -8 or -1 either. because they hardly ever get any cpu cycles the
> cron jobs stay around for ages, using memory, file handles, and other
> resources.

 I think we should improve nice with the following feature:

  nice --boost-delayed    =)

 It would for to run the task asked, but it would wait a configurable amount
of time for it to finish. If the task has not finished in, say, 20min, nice
would increase its priority. Of cours this would only be useful for root,
since root is the only user who can increase priority of a process. But cron
jobs run under root privilege (and nice could also have an --as-user
parameter.. hummmm) ...