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How can I limit the processor usage limit for the copying process when it is running? My friend and I are planning to get a PC to host servers and we need to know how to limit this usage to the copying process because last time we did a host machine, every time we were copying new files the servers were starting to lag.

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  • It's probably that the filesystem you are using will play a larger factor in CPU usage than the cp process itself. And the fs work is going to be system usage, not user.
    – Jon Lin
    Aug 11, 2012 at 19:33
  • Copying files from where to where? If you are copying files over the network it would be logical for the server to lag...
    – thkala
    Aug 11, 2012 at 19:40

2 Answers 2

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Use nice for CPU

The CPU scheduling priority is handled with nice(1), which says:

Run COMMAND with an adjusted niceness, which affects process scheduling. With no COMMAND, print the current niceness. Nicenesses range from -20 (most favorable scheduling) to 19 (least favorable).

Use ionice for Disk I/O

Using ionice -c3 will use idle priority for disk I/O. The ionice(1) manual page says:

A program running with idle io priority will only get disk time when no other program has asked for disk io for a defined grace period. The impact of idle io processes on normal system activity should be zero.

Combine the Two Options

For the least impact on your system, you can combine the two. For example:

# Run script with lowest possible CPU and disk priorities.
nice -n19 ionice -c3 foo.sh
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    There also is schedtool, which sets general scheduler policy (including I/O).
    – u1686_grawity
    Aug 11, 2012 at 20:47
  • do you have to repeat the nice ionice combination if you use piped commands, e.g. nice -n19 ionice -c3 grep xyz | grep zzz ? Is grep zzz also niced or do you have to repeat the nice ionice in front of the grep zzz, means nice -n19 ionice -c3 grep xyz | nice -n19 ionice -c3 grep zzz ?
    – bzero
    Aug 15, 2012 at 6:18
  • @bzero nice and ionice propagate to subshells, so you'd need to (io)nice the PPID or enclose your pipelines in (...) or {...;} if you want that to work.
    – CodeGnome
    Aug 15, 2012 at 13:12
  • @CodeGnome : like nice -n19 ionice -c3 grep xyz | (grep zzz) ?
    – bzero
    Aug 16, 2012 at 14:04
  • No, you can only do something like (renice -n 19 -p $BASHPID; ionice -c 3 -p $BASHPID; foo | bar) or nice -n 19 ionice -c 3 bash -c "foo | bar". (Note that { ...; } doesn't actually run a subshell.)
    – u1686_grawity
    Aug 24, 2012 at 1:02
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Copying has very little CPU impact, the resource it uses is IO bandwidth.

You should prefix io-intensive commands with ionice -c2 -n6 if you don't want them to impact other applications too much. You can also confine stuff using cgroups and the blkio controller, but that's more involved.

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