How to permanently set higher process priority in GUI

[Tony Baechler - BATS]

On 7/19/2015 10:54 AM, Nils Kassube wrote:

> I would expect that the main problem was that the desktop user had other
> applications running at the same time which needed a lot of resources,
> not only X alone. Something like firefox running with a lot of tabs for
> various websites.


Yes, I think you're right.  By several minutes, I mean that after about 10 
minutes, it had only done about 2 minutes of video.  He really doesn't know 
anything about bit rates, frame rates, etc, so it's mostly trial and error. 
  I'm sure he keeps Firefox and who knows what else open when he's doing the 
transcoding, besides not having a fast processor to start.  The only reason 
why I thought increasing the priority might help is that it seems to make a 
difference on the command line.  On the server, I installed the schedtool 
package and I usually do something like this as root:

schedtool -2 -p99 -e ffmpeg "$@"

By giving it the highest process and I/O priority, I can convert a 30 minute 
video in about 5 minutes (yes, I've timed it).  Again, that's with 32 GB of 
memory and 8 CPU cores which obviously makes a difference.

Just as another random thought, would using a low latency kernel make any 
difference?  It seemed to help slightly on the server.

Thanks for doing your experiment.  I've found that even with nice -19, it 
still isn't at the highest priority which is why I installed schedtool.  At 
least this confirms that my idea was wrong and wouldn't have worked anyway.