Toolserver:Nice

nice tells the system how much resources to devote to that process. This is useful in multiuser environments where there are limited resources. Long-running processes should usually have a high niceness level (ie low priority) like 10. The default level is 0 (which is the highest priority).

Use with cron and/or phoenix
Recall that processes inherit the nice level of their parent. If using cron, one might try to do */5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/phoenix nice -n 10 python /home/user/program.py >/dev/null But that is wrong and your program will not work properly. Instead, set the nice level on phoenix and let the spawned process inherit it: */5 * * * * nice -n 10 /usr/local/bin/phoenix python /home/user/program.py >/dev/null This of course applies if you're not using cron: nice -n 10 phoenix python /home/user/program.py

renice
renice can be used to lower the nice level of already-running processes (you cannot increase nice levels unless you're root): renice 10 -p 1234 If necessary, you can renice all processes belonging to you: renice 11 -u $USER

Viewing nice levels
You can view nice levels in the column "NI" with top -u USER but that doesn't tell you much if your processes are called "python", "python", "python" and "python".

Instead, try ps l Or if you have processes with no TTY, use ps xl