Hewwo folks.
I'd like to know if it was at all possible to make a certain program
(POV) run with a nice value other than 0 as default? I use my machine
for single user tasks, and I'd like to have pov running at -5 (or such)
as default withouth having to work as root and renice it all the time.
Then I'd be able to set it to something like 15 for longer renders..

possible? dumb? 

-- 
//Spider    --  [ spider@bahnhof.se ]-[ http://darkmere.wanfear.com/ ]
And the devil in black dress watches over
    My guardian angel walks away
Life is short and love is always over in the morning
    Black wind come carry me far away
            --"Sisters of Mercy" -- "Temple Of Love"

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Spider wrote:
> 
> Hewwo folks.
> I'd like to know if it was at all possible to make a certain program
> (POV) run with a nice value other than 0 as default? I use my machine
> for single user tasks, and I'd like to have pov running at -5 (or such)
> as default withouth having to work as root and renice it all the time.
> Then I'd be able to set it to something like 15 for longer renders..
> 
> possible? dumb?

It's easily possible to automatically set a lower priority with an alias
or a front-end script.  It sounds like that's not what you have in mind,
though. ;-)

It should be possible to write a script to get the PID (assuming you
only have one render going) and renice it using "su -c".  It will
require password verification, but it should be much less painful than
doing this manually.  Sound useful, or never mind?

Nice thought, yes. ;-) And nice seeing you again, BTW.

-Mark Gordon

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I don't know if there's any other way to set a negatice nice other than
running it as root or setting the effective UID of the program to root
(and the program changes its own nice to the desired value). The latter one
is very dangerous if there are other users in the same system.
  Perhaps theres another way (there's so much I don't know about unix...).

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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Mark Gordon wrote:
> 
> It's easily possible to automatically set a lower priority with an alias
> or a front-end script.  It sounds like that's not what you have in mind,
> though. ;-)
Not really :) A lower priority wouldn't really speed things up.. :I
 
> It should be possible to write a script to get the PID (assuming you
> only have one render going) and renice it using "su -c".  It will
> require password verification, but it should be much less painful than
> doing this manually.  Sound useful, or never mind?
it does sound useful, yes.

> Nice thought, yes. ;-) And nice seeing you again, BTW.
(re)nice ;-) to see you as well 
(nope, no more pov crashes :)

Hm, should probably do something like that on X as well.. should be
easier since it leaves .pid files.. then perhaps a root cron job to exec
it once every 15 mins...

oh. while on the matter of X ... is there a way to restart the XFree86
server without killing all programs that run through it? I've noticed
that it does increase quite a lot in memory consumption after some use,
and running a long time task or such through it leaves you in a bit
bothered situation...


-- 
//Spider    --  [ spider@bahnhof.se ]-[ http://darkmere.wanfear.com/ ]
And the devil in black dress watches over
    My guardian angel walks away
Life is short and love is always over in the morning
    Black wind come carry me far away
            --"Sisters of Mercy" -- "Temple Of Love"

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>   I don't know if there's any other way to set a negatice nice other than
> running it as root or setting the effective UID of the program to root
> (and the program changes its own nice to the desired value). The latter one
> is very dangerous if there are other users in the same system.
>   Perhaps theres another way (there's so much I don't know about unix...).

According to the man page for "nice", only the superuser can request
a negative "nice" value (i.e. higher priority). Any user can request
a positive value (i.e. lower priority).

You might build a script that invokes the renderer with appropriate
arguments and make that script setuid root. As pointed out above,
though, this would be dangerous if there are other users on the box.
Is this a single-user computer?

Setting the nice value might not be necessary, though. If you're the
only user and nothing else is going on in the background, it just
might be that POV will get the lion's share of cycles anyway. Try
running "top" to see what is running on the box. Anything that's
in a sleeping state won't be taking cycles, as they're waiting on 
an external event before being scheduled to run again, so no CPU
time is going to those processes anyway. I just opened up a shell
on my machine at home with X and Netscape running (plus loads of
support stuff), and everything except "top" was sleeping, waiting
for input.

If you're not running anything computationally intensive (number-
crunching, downloading a file, whatever) at the same time you're
running POV, I doubt you'll see any significant speedup from the
negative "nice" setting.

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Check out sudo. This gives you quite some opportunities.
Just configure it such that you can access renice as root.

Axel

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Spider wrote:
> 
> oh. while on the matter of X ... is there a way to restart the XFree86
> server without killing all programs that run through it? I've noticed
> that it does increase quite a lot in memory consumption after some use,
> and running a long time task or such through it leaves you in a bit
> bothered situation...

Start programs nohup, and they ought to survive bouncing X.  Not much
you can do once they're started, though, but good for future reference I
hope.

-Mark Gordon

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Steve Martin wrote:

> You might build a script that invokes the renderer with appropriate
> arguments and make that script setuid root. As pointed out above,
> though, this would be dangerous if there are other users on the box.
> Is this a single-user computer?

Some systems don't allow scripts to be run SUID root.  It wouldn't be
too big a deal to rewrite it in C, but I wouldn't recommend it.

> Setting the nice value might not be necessary, though. If you're the
> only user and nothing else is going on in the background, it just
> might be that POV will get the lion's share of cycles anyway. Try
> running "top" to see what is running on the box. Anything that's
> in a sleeping state won't be taking cycles, as they're waiting on
> an external event before being scheduled to run again, so no CPU
> time is going to those processes anyway. I just opened up a shell
> on my machine at home with X and Netscape running (plus loads of
> support stuff), and everything except "top" was sleeping, waiting
> for input.
> 
> If you're not running anything computationally intensive (number-
> crunching, downloading a file, whatever) at the same time you're
> running POV, I doubt you'll see any significant speedup from the
> negative "nice" setting.

I see my share of CPU drop when my nightly cron jobs start chugging
away, but outside of that, I pretty much agree.

-Mark Gordon

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Mark Gordon wrote:
> 
> Start programs nohup, and they ought to survive bouncing X.  Not much
> you can do once they're started, though, but good for future reference I
> hope.
> 
How do I do that?
(ignorance at work here)
-- 
//Spider    --  [ spider@bahnhof.se ]-[ http://darkmere.wanfear.com/ ]
And the devil in black dress watches over
    My guardian angel walks away
Life is short and love is always over in the morning
    Black wind come carry me far away
            --"Sisters of Mercy" -- "Temple Of Love"

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Spider wrote:
> 
> Mark Gordon wrote:
> >
> > Start programs nohup, and they ought to survive bouncing X.  Not much
> > you can do once they're started, though, but good for future reference I
> > hope.
> >
> How do I do that?
> (ignorance at work here)
> --
> //Spider    --  [ spider@bahnhof.se ]-[ http://darkmere.wanfear.com/ ]
> And the devil in black dress watches over
>     My guardian angel walks away
> Life is short and love is always over in the morning
>     Black wind come carry me far away
>             --"Sisters of Mercy" -- "Temple Of Love"

Hi,
a) RTFM (oops, reads man nohup)
b) nohup povray foobar &

Note:
XWindows programs won't do this. If you quit the X-server and want to
restart it, all programs with graphical output need to be terminated.

Axel

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