Nice value - Nice values are user-space values that we can use to control the priority of a process. In Linux system priorities are 0 to 139 in which 0 to 99 for real-time and 100 to 139 for users. Priority value - The priority value is the process’s actual priority which is used by the Linux kernel to schedule a task. Now that we have enough context, let’s dive into the specifics. For example- if there is a process A, which detects fraud with input data and there is another process B, which makes hourly backups of some data, then the priority(A) > priority(B)! This ensures that if both A and B are running at the same time, A would be allocated more processing bandwidth. Why worry about the priority of your process? Some processes may be highly CPU-intensive but not as important as others and hence can have a lower priority while others may or may not be highly CPU-intensive but are very important and hence should have higher priority. This lets us run multiple processes on a CPU even if it has just 1 core. When the number of processes is more than n, the processes are switched between very fast using advanced context-switching mechanisms to provide multitasking. Basically, if a CPU has n cores then it can only execute n processes in parallel. What we should generally take into consideration is the amount of CPU bandwidth that our processes are eligible for, especially in cases of contention with other processes sharing the processing power of the CPU.īefore we jump into the priority and nice values and how they help us It is important to have a top-level understanding of how CPUs run multiple processes at the same time.

But luckily all the abstracted details around memory management like memory allocation and context switching b/w processes are very well optimized and developers don’t have to worry about these things while writing high-level code. How does Linux do memory management to execute your processes is a little complicated thing to explain.

Task manager priority high vs real time