whatis nice
Nice Value
Also known as: nice, renice, niceness, process priority
A process's CPU scheduling priority from -20 (highest) to 19 (lowest), set with nice at launch or renice while running.
What Is a Nice Value in Linux?
A higher nice value means the process is "nicer" to others and gets less CPU time when there is competition. It does nothing on an idle machine. Regular users can only raise niceness; lowering it needs root.
ionice does the same for disk I/O. Running backups and compiles with nice -n 19 ionice -c3 keeps the system responsive while they work.
Example
nice -n 19 tar -czf backup.tgz /home
renice -n 5 -p 4312Learn more about Nice Value
- nice, renice, and ionice: Controlling Process Priority on Linux A backup job should not make your desktop stutter. Priority tools let you tell the kernel which work matters less, for both CPU time and disk access, and the disk one is usually the fix people actually need.