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MrFidge
Asked: 2011-08-06 02:36:29 +0800 CST

Linux throttle disc writes

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I'm writing a shell script to copy gigabytes of data from directory A to directory B.

The script runs just fine, but it's absolutely eating the available resources - presumably disc read/writes?

Is there some way of throttling processes to limit their resource usage for disc / processor / ram etc?

linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Linux kernel has different scheduling classes for I/O. Use ionice command to benefit from them.

    For example

    ionice -c 3 your_copy_script.sh

    would run your script in idle class, meaning script would only get I/O time whenever no other process needs it.

    If you need to modify an already running process, 

    ionice -c 3 -p pid_of_your_program

    would do it. See man ionice for more information.

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