nice and user state in top

[Camel_1]

Hi there,

I have a Oracle export script, I found that if I run the script in shell prompt, the process will run in "USER" stat (shown from top command). However if I run it by cron schedule, it will run in "NICE" state and it takes more time to finish compare running in shell prompt. Any idea what is the different?

Thanks,

Simon

[Peter Godron]

Simon,
I believe the nice state may be down to the cron daemon. What value is cron running at,
as
"Normally, all processes inherit the system nice value of their parent process when they are spawned." see "man nice"

However if something is run in background mode the nice value changes.

[Camel_1]

Peter, here is the ps output of the cron daemon.

1 S root 2759 1 0 154 20 5336d2c0 27 502c346e Sep 10 ? 0:04 /usr/sbin/cron