Working with processes: ionice

ionice changes the disk priority of a given process. A process may have one of three classes of ionice: Idle, Best Effort, or Real Time. BE and RT may further be sliced up into priority 0-7.

me@locutus:~$ ionice -c3 /usr/lib/thunderbird-8.0/thunderbird-bin

me@locutus:~$ ps axl | head -n 1 ; ps axl | grep thunderbird | grep -v grep F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND 0 1000 2779 1 20 10 2323372 1247792 poll_s Sl ? 65:17 /usr/lib/thunderbird-8.0/thunderbird-bin

me@locutus:~$ sudo ionice -p2779 idle

me@locutus:~$ sudo ionice -c2 -n0 -p2779 ; sudo ionice -p2779 best-effort: prio 0