% Nice

[Ripcord]

You know, I just noticed the "% Nice" display in the Activity Monitor, in addition to % User, % System, etc, since my CPU was hitting 100% as a result of whatever these "Nice" processes are.

I've never heard of this before, and so far research hasn't turned up anything. Does anyone have any clue what this % Nice thing is?

 

[Arden]

It tells you how sweet UNIX is on Valentine's Day.

Does this help at all?

 

[bobw]

nice
runs utility at an altered scheduling priority. If an increment is
given, it is used; otherwise an increment of 10 is assumed. The super-
user can run utilities with priorities higher than normal by using a neg-
ative increment. The priority can be adjusted over a range of -20 (the
highest) to 20 (the lowest)


Open Terminal and type - man nice

to get more info

 

[andychrist]

And for those of us afeared of the Terminal, there are a bunch of utilities that can help set priorities easily, such as Memory Usage Getter, many of whose features have been incorporated into the Activity Viewer under Panther.

2.2.2 http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/8316

It can really speed up Repair Permissions and Indexing, among other things.