Re: [MLUG] Help with computing project

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Brent Deterding wrote:
> 
> Once upon a time I wrote a set of scripts that used every machine in the
> supercluster to run distributed.net for me. I had it pretty good. If there were
> ANY other users on it died, if the load was above 1 it died. It ran nice'd up to
> 20. The downfall was that it only checked for other users and load every 2
> minutes; so it could conceivably be running for 2 minutes nice'd at 20 while
> someone was on.
> 
> Doesn't sound like a big deal but my boss at the time Greg Johnson found it
> while teaching the UNIX class and wrote a script in class to kill the clients
> and my account :) I think it made Mathematica sluggish even though it was
> nice'd.
> 

Yes, I am finding out from experience that nice works quite differently
on Linux and FreeBSD.  If you put a program at nice level 20 on FreeBSD,
the program works at full speed, but as soon as any regular CPU inensive
program starts working (like netscape Java) the niced program goes to
almost 0 speed.  As such any nice=20 program really will have very
little interference on a FreeBSD computer.

On the other hand Linux seems to be more moderate in the extent that it
slows down the nice=20 programs, and I can see that nice=20 programs
would indeed make Mathematica sluggish on a Linux machine.



-- 
Stephen Montgomery-Smith
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen
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