Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 489171
cron should be nicer and ionicer
Last modified: 2014-09-04 08:14:56 EDT
It would be nice if cron would run all jobs as if they were prefixed with nice ionice -c2 -n6 Nicely starting the cron daemon itself would also be nice. Have a nice nice day.
The particular values would be targets for tuning on a per-job basis, though some sane defaults are probably worthwhile (I don't need slocate to take all my I/O, thanks!). Just to spur discussion, a proposal that steals from SELinux's MLS_LEVEL crond approach: add to /etc/sysconfig/crond: IO_CLASS=2 IO_PRIORITY=6 NICE=10 and then modify crond to recognize: CRON_IO_CLASS=2 CRON_IO_PRIORITY=6 CRON_NICE=10 environment variables in crontabs and launch the jobs under nice and ionice if any of the above are set. I stuck CROND_ in there to quasi-namespace them, so we don't clobber others' use of the names (which might be likely if this is filling an existing need). The init script can launch prepend CRON_ when it starts crond. This would be a big win for both desktops and servers, both of which tend to get unexpectedly bogged down during some common cron tasks.
This seems very reasonable.
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