[LBo] Nice levels in top

[Jim Westbrook]

Nice doesn't throttle back the usage of cpu unless some other task has 
need for it.  At that point, the niced task will give up some of its cpu 
usage to the other process.

JimW

Andrew Henry wrote:

>I'm reading chapter 4.3.5.7 and it talks about renicing running processes.
>
>I'm running Soundjuicer to rip my CD collection and it's using about
>80-90% CPU according to Top.  I have an AMD Turion64 1.6GHz chip.
>
>When I hit 'r' and type the process ID, then set nice level to 20, it
>does change it (but only to 19) but the process continues to use ~90%
>CPU.  According to the manual, this should mean that the process only
>uses 1/5 of the total CPU cycles.  Why is this not working?  I expect it
>to drop to about 20% CPU.  Or am I interpretting it incorrectly?
>
>Thanks,
>andrew
>
>  
>