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Background:

I use a computing cluster at work (4 slave nodes and 1 head node) that uses the SGE job scheduler. Recently we've been running jobs that do some heavy IO and it has been slowing down shell/vim usage (small IO, but we need it running smoothly 24/7). I found ionice, and it seems like a perfect solution for one computer, but I'm not sure it will be helpful on a cluster...

Question:

If I run a process (let's say vim) through the head node with a ionice setting (-c2 -n0), will it still have any priority over processes on other computers (high IO on slaves -c2 -n4) to the shared HD?

Thanks for your time!

Kamil Kisiel
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sequenceGeek
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1 Answers1

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The ionice command will only affect contention for IO among processes that are operating on the same machine. It won't help with a device that has contention from many machines unless the machine ionice on is running a process serving those machines.

You probably want to partition your operating system(s) onto a different spindle(s) from all of your working cluster data.

Jeff Ferland
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