renice command: Change the Priority of a Already Running Process

Q. I'd like alter / change the scheduling priority of running processes. How do I change the Priority of a already running process under CentOS Linux or any UNIX like operating systems?

A. If you run CPU-bond processes you must use nice command used to start process with modified scheduling priority / nicenesses. renice command is used to change the priority of a process that's already running.

renice command syntax:

The renice command changes the nice value of a process already running. It's syntax is as follows:
renice {priority} pid
The following will change nice value of process 2243 to 19, enter:
# renice 19 2243
The following will change the priority of process ID’s 1024 and all processes owned by users vivek, enter:
# renice +1 1024 -u vivek
The following will change the priority of process ID’s 1024 and 66, and all processes owned by users daemon and root.
# renice +1 1024 -u daemon root -p 66
Please note that:

  1. Users can only change the nice value of processes which they own.
  2. User cannot start processes with nice values less than 20
  3. User cannot lower the nice values of their processes after they've raised them.
  4. As usual root has full access to renice command

For more details and options see renice command man page:
$ man renice

Want to read Linux tips and tricks, but don't have time to check our blog everyday? Subscribe to our daily email newsletter to make sure you don't miss a single tip/tricks. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here!

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

1 Sarika 06.13.08 at 2:37 am

perfect!

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Previous post: Display the Natted / Routed Connections on a Linux Iptable Firewall

Next post: Reconfiguring FreeBSD Ports – Remove OPTIONS config For Any Port