[olug] anyone having trouble with recent Linuxes on 32-bit servers?

[Lou Duchez]

ionice and nice take different parameters, so I remain superstitious 
about their interchangeabilitude.  Superstitious but not skeptical: I 
know you're probably absolutely right, but doing things my dopey way 
seems to be working out all right and right about now I would rather not 
make waves.

Nevertheless I am in the final stages of upgrading all my old old 
machines to new 64-bit machines, so hopefully the problem no longer 
exists.  And the fine new equipment I'm using?  These guys:

http://www.bjs.com/asus-m32bf-desktop--amd--a8--4gb-memory--1tb-hard-drive.product.3000000000000636086

Even a cheapie $280 server is going to be able to handle the tasks that 
my decade-old beasts had to.  I've gotten a few of these ASUSes and I'm 
pretty happy with them thus far.

Anyway, merry whatever to people, stay warm and enjoy the holidays.


> ionice is just the command that nice is running. You could run ionice by
> itself, or put any command in place of ionice to run at reduced CPU
> priority.
>
> On Sun, Dec 4, 2016 at 8:14 AM, Lou Duchez <lou at paprikash.com> wrote:
>
>> About a month ago, I installed updates to Fedora 24 on a variety of
>> servers, and the 64-bit servers were all fine, but the 32-bit servers
>> suddenly started having memory issues.  Like, the servers would crash under
>> load (such as when copying lots of files in a backuip), the oom-killer
>> would get invoked frequently, and so on. Anyone else experience the like?
>> Does anyone have recommendations?
>>
>> One thing I did to mitigate the problem somewhat, though not solve it, was
>> to make use of nice and ionice.  "nice" manages the CPU priority of a task,
>> and "ionice" manages the I/O priority of a task; between the two of them,
>> you can instruct Linux to run a task at low CPU and I/O priority.  This
>> helped with some of the tasks that were causing trouble, such as backup
>> processes.
>>
>> To run a command as low priority, it is:
>>
>> /usr/bin/nice -n19 /usr/bin/ionice -c2 -n7 [your command here]
>>
>> And yes you can turn that into a handy little script, so you can simply
>> run "[script name] [your command here]":
>>
>> ---
>>
>> #!/bin/bash
>>
>> /usr/bin/nice -n19 /usr/bin/ionice -c2 -n7 $*
>>
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