[Ardour-Users] Slow graphics with large project

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 10/08/2011 11:22 AM, John Rigg wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 08, 2011 at 08:48:21AM +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> I don't no if it would help, but some people claim, that using a value
>> for "nice" for PAM should help, when there are issues regarding to the
>> GUIs. I wonder if "nice" has any effect to real-time, but perhaps it has
>> got?!
>
> Real-time processes don't use nice values. They use rtprio.

and even if they did, nice values are all about relative priorities.
so if a non-realtime thread is being starved by another non-realtime 
thread that eats up all the cpu, nicing the bad guy up (or nicing the 
good guy down) could have some effect.
but if ardour is the only program that eats significant amounts of cpu 
(which is usually the case in situations like these), there is no one 
you could take extra cpu time away from...

generally, it's good to take "nice" literally: it's a way to be nice to 
other users - if you nice up a long-running task, you basically say, ok, 
do this unless there are more pressing things to do. that's what it was 
made for.
root can use negative nice values, thereby giving more cpu to any non-rt 
task, but that won't give you more than 100% of the available cycles.
nice is for multi-user environments. if you have to use it to balance 
your own tasks against one another, someone has screwed up :)

so let's bury the myth that a negative-nice permission in 
/etc/security/limits.conf is useful. it's not.

-- 
Jörn Nettingsmeier
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