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Lower the priority of a running process

caution rootProcessesdebian, ubuntu

Caution: This command changes the system. Understand what it does before you run it.

Adjust the values, the command updates live
root@server
renice -n 19 -p 1234 && ionice -c 3 -p 1234

Sets the process’s nice value to 19 and its IO class to idle. Handy when a backup or import is already running and slowing down websites, but you do not want to abort it. The change only applies to this one process; child processes that have already started keep their priority.

Note: Any user can lower the priority of their own processes. Raising priority and changing other users’ processes requires root.

Also searched as

  • throttle a running process
  • change process priority after start
  • renice process
  • backup already running and slowing down the server

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$uptime && nproc
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$ps -eo user= | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
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#ss -tlnp 'sport = :80'
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Find out which processes are using swap

$for f in /proc/[0-9]*/status; do awk '/^Name:/ {n=$2} /^VmSwap:/ {print $2, "kB", n}' "$f"; done 2>/dev/null | sort -rn | head -15
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Find processes killed by the OOM killer

#journalctl -k --no-pager | grep -iE "out of memory|oom-kill|killed process"
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