Neg Nice explanations

[Doug_3]

Can someone provide a conceptual and nice (ha!) explanation of neg nice in the cpu glance display? What processes and demands are associated with it, etc.

tia
Doug

[Sean Bastille · Accepted solution]

A nice'd process is one where you've told the kernel to give this process less priority on the cpu than normal processes (or any process with a higher priority than yours).

A negative nice value means that you've told the kernel to give this process more priority than normal processes (or any process with a lower priority than yours).

Unfortunately, I always get priority implimentations confused, as different flavors of unix use different values, so you will have to consult the man page if you want to know whether 0 is higher than 40. I believe 0-19 is niced, 20 is normal, 21-40 is negative nice, and +40 is real time.

Since you're requesting a higher priority than other user processes, only the superuser can request a negative nice.

[Cheryl Griffin]

Doug,
Did you try the Online Help within Glance?

[Cheryl Griffin]

This is from the help (I hope it helps):
* GBL_CPU_NNICE_UTIL

The percentage of time that the CPU
was in user mode at a nice priority
computed from processes with
negative nice values during the
interval.

Prior to HP-UX 10.0, the NICE
metrics included both positively and
negatively niced processes. In 10.0
and later releases, the NICE metrics
include positive nice value CPU time
only. Negative nice value CPU is
broken out into NNICE (negative
nice) metrics. Positive nice values
range from 20 to 39. Negative nice
values range from 0 to 19.

[Ian_4]

Nice in Glance, is the value of the time that a specific process, was in user mode at a nice priority during the last interval.

Ian

[CHRIS ANORUO]

Also check the online manual for nice on your system

[Doug_3]

Cheryl,
Yes I did check the gpm help screens (cpu, index, glossary). Perhaps I didn't look in the correct area, but I wanted to know conceptually what neg nice meant. The index search discussed how to renice a process and the rank of scores from 1-19, etc. The Glossary just said the items are ranked, but a negative value begs the question on the scale or base. The cpu and cpu graph help screens had 1-2 sentances each and did not ref neg nice.
Regards,
Doug

[Cheryl Griffin]

Doug,
With Glance help, you have to be in the screen (for instance have neg nice on screen) before you go into the help to get context sensitive help. Otherwise, the help will be generalized. :^(

I would prefer an Index of help and the ability to select neg nice from a list to bring up the help. Would be so much easier to find what you need that way.

[Doug_3]

thank you.