niced

a daemon renicing new and existing processes

Description

niced is a daemon which monitors new (using the Linux netlink connector) and existing processes and changes their 'niceness' according to configured rules.

It supports modification of processes' nice, ionice and oom_adj/oom_score_adj properties.

This daemon was inspired by the renice project and the configuration file should be backward compatible.

Daemon

systemd service is provided:

$ sudo systemctl enable niced.service
$ sudo systemctl start niced.service

Synopsis

niced [--config-file PATH] [-h|--help]

--config-file
use given configuration file instead of /etc/niced.conf

Configuration

Configuration is stored in the /etc/niced.conf file.

Modifying niced behavior:

• @full_scan_interval = N
  in seconds, default is 10
• @verbose = N
-2 silent, -1 quiet, 0 default, 1 yes, 2 very, 3 debug

Lines beginning with # are comments.

Configuration rules

Syntax:
actions pattern

Actions can be separated with a comma, or written together without separators.

Actions

Syntax:
action[parameter]

Actions and parameters:

• modifiers:
  • I - case-insensitive pattern
  • F - forced rule, reapplied every full scan
  • R - recursive: 1..., default is inf
• nice:
  • n - nice: -20...19, default is 10
• ionice:
  • r - realtime ionice: 0...7, default is 4
  • b - best-effort ionice: 0...7, default is 4
  • i - idle ionice
• oom:
  • o - oom_adj: -17...15, default is 0
  • O - oom_score_adj: -1000...1000, default is 0

Patterns

Patterns are regular expressions, case-sensitive by default.

The entire command including parameters is matched.

If your pattern begins with ^ or (, it is matched literally. This means you have to keep in mind a potential full path before the executable name or the parameters after it.

Otherwise niced takes care of those for you by enclosing your pattern with the following regular expression syntax:

([^\s]*/)? and (\s.*)?

Examples

/etc/niced.conf:

@full_scan_interval = 10
@verbose = 3
n-15 Xorg
n-15 kwin_x11
n-15 pulseaudio
n-10 barrier
n-10 mpv
n0R1 plasmashell
n-5  plasmashell
n0R1 krunner
n-5  krunner
n0   konsole
n1RI SCREEN
in10 ark
in10 tar
in10 unxz
in10 dpkg
in10 mandb
in15 gcc
in15 g++
in15 cc1
in15 cc1plus
in15 dkms
in15 gp

Files

/etc/niced.conf

Dependencies

• python3
• forkstat

See also

nice(1), ionice(1), proc(5), forkstat(8)

Bugs

Report bugs or ideas at https://github.com/phd/niced/issues

Author

Copyright (C) 2023 Piotr Henryk Dabrowski <phd@phd.re>