Starting an application in OS X with low priority

Question

Hello.
I would like to setup my Eve Online application to start with lowest priority every time I open it. Is it possible, and how?

I am using Mac OS X 10.6.2...

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

The nice command runs a program at a lower (or setable) priority. Put something such as

nice -n 20 eve_online

in your .bashrc. That isn't quite it since it will run each time you open a terminal window.

Answer 2

As Brian points out, you can use the nice command, but this isn't really a user-friendly option.

Why do you want to do this?

As long as your application is reasonably well designed and not actively consuming large amounts of CPU/disk the whole time, contention with other apps should be a non-issue. There is absolutely no need to go messing with process priorities. This is even more the case these days where virtually all systems have at least two cores.

Unless you have a very, very good reason to modify your process priority then you should just leave it alone, the kernel knows what to do with your process better than you do.

Answer 3

You can use nice to launch a process at a specific priority and renice to alter the priority of an existing process. One thing you can do is open the Activity Monitor to find the Process ID (PID) of the application whose priority you wish to adjust, then you can use the command renice with that PID, as in:

renice -n 20 -p pid

In the above, just replace pid with the process id as given by "ps aux" or Activity Monitor.