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Idea #5055: Renice the active program

bug This idea is a duplicate of Idea #7565: Focused window process boost.
Written by Rioting_Pacifist the 18 Mar 08 at 22:11. Category: System. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: New
Rationale
Most users will only notice how responsive what they're doing is, by renicing the active window, ubuntu will seam faster and more responsive.

usage cases.
Bob has decided to update his amarok colection/update his system/install a large program/compile a large program/backup his system, as this is going to take some time on his old system, he switches to Firefox to waste some time.

*obviously some users wont want this so it should be easy to disable
**for bonus points do clever stuff with the processes that the window is relying on.

this would fit in nicely with http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/4121/, but be even more useful
Tags: renice

21
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Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #5055
Written by Rioting_Pacifist the 18 Mar 08 at 22:11.
Ubuntu Brainstorm was updated in January 2009. Since the idea #5055 was submitted before this update, its rationale and solution are not separated. Please vote accordingly, and if you have the necessary rights, please separate the rationale from the solution. Thanks!

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Comments
Eldmannen wrote on the 19 Mar 08 at 01:46
This sounds clever.
I think it needs to be investigated...

flip314 wrote on the 19 Mar 08 at 15:24
If Bob is smart enough to compile a large program he's smart enough to renice.

I think using sane nice values for processes in the first place is a better overall approach. Amarok should update at a low priority, for example.

Also, in your example, IO is as likely as anything else to be the limiting factor in most of those activities. Should we give higher IO priority to foreground apps?

Warbo wrote on the 19 Mar 08 at 16:27
If I'm, say, rendering something on one desktop (ie. something processor intensive that doesn't need any knowledge of the system, including renice) and I decide I want to listen to some music whilst I wait then I don't want Amarok to build the collection at a low priority at all.

The point of this idea is that the focus gets the priority, since that is a sensible way of determining what the user's priority is. Assigning sensible defaults is of course important, but every application can have a for scenario and an against sceario. For example, daily cron jobs would seem like a good candidate for having low priority, but the other night I had to wait until the APT commands run by cron had finished before I could install any packages and thus carry on with the development I was doing which required those packages.


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