[cfarm-users] Best practices for not hogging resources (nice, ionice, ramdisk etc.)

[Segher Boessenkool]

On Thu, Aug 05, 2021 at 05:14:34PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> Per Segher's recent-ish mail about gcc185:
> 
>     You can connect to the machine at gcc185.fsffrance.org, default SSH
>     port.  Please be aware and mindful of others (do not hog all CPU, all
>     memory, all disk space, etc.)
> 
> Do others here have any tips for being nicer on these servers? My
> personal test scripts do:
> 
>  * A nice -n 19
>  * An ionice -c 3 (works on Linux boxes)
>  * Run any build/testing in the /run/user/$(id -u) ramdisk, or
>    /scratch/$USER on AIX.
> 
> When there's a build or tests I need to wait for I'm sometimes more
> aggressive with "make -jN" on modern Linux boxes than otherwise, knowing
> that the scheduler (mostly) will guarantee that should others need the
> resources more my jobs will be penalized first.

Yes, non-"interactive" jobs (e.g. cron jobs) should use a very low -j.
Also, those jobs *need* to be monitored!  Nothing is as infuriating as
finding out a machine has been unusable for three days because some
cron job misbehaved and wasn't looked after.

All of the bigger machines have enough CPU, RAM, and I/O that hogging
that does not so easily occur, if you play nice.  But one resource is
problematic on most machines still: disk space.  So please always be
pro-active in cleaning up after yourself :-)


Segher