Limit CPU usage of background process if system is busy

Question

At the moment I do the following: When I see that the system load of my Ubuntu server is high, I get the PIDs of specific currently running background processes and start cpulimit with the PID. When the system load gets lower, I kill cpulimit, so that the background processes can run faster. When the load is still too high, I also kill cpulimit and start it again with a lower limit for the process.

I repeat this until the background processes are done after a few hours. But it gets very annoying to do this manually every day, so I would like to know if there is a way to automate this.

Have you already answered the question: "How should a system distinguish between foreground and background processes on a server?" If so, please add this to your question. — Marco, Jul 24 '23 at 05:42
Also, how do you determine that system is busy? How do you define a "busy system"? — aviro, Jul 24 '23 at 13:20

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 24 '23 at 05:47

0

You could simply try running "background" processes using nice -20.

That won't affect their performance if they are the only ones running but if you have foreground tasks, those will run faster as they are not "niced".

answered Jul 24 '23 at 05:47

Artem S. Tashkinov

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Limit CPU usage of background process if system is busy

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