On Thu, 10 Jan 2013, "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
Prior to that, I recommend investigating nice, ionice and ulimit, but these are probably too coarse-grained for something like tbird.
ulimit allows a process to be killed when it uses too much CPU time, this isn't good when you want the job to be completed. nice and ionice are generally only good when there are multiple processes and you want to have relative priorities. The problem as described is a desire to have CPU power go unused which won't be addressed by this. On Thu, 10 Jan 2013, Chris Samuel <chris@csamuel.org> wrote:
Could any of you point me to instructions to get Ubuntu to limit or choke the demand that the Thunderbird process calls upon the CPU?
Sounds like a job for control groups to me..
http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/cgroups.txt
The cpu subsystem is likely what you want.
That documentation only seems to refer to limiting the number of CPUs in use (although it's very complicated and I probably missed some things). That doesn't seem to help. The program that periodically uses sigstop/sigcont seems like a good option, but I think that the real problem as desired isn't something you want to solve. Modern CPUs are designed to run at temperatures a lot hotter than 60C, we just have to deal with it. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/