Re: [Condor-users] Evidence of Impact when running "nice" on windows"

["Matt Hope" <matthew.hope@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/26/06, James Osborne <osborneja1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi All
>
> Does anybody out there have any evidence that documents the impact, or
> hopefully lack thereof of running Condor on Windows (or Linux) to always run
> jobs - even when a user is logged in - but at the lowest priority i.e.
> job_renice_increment set to 19.  The reason I ask is that I have been
> conducting a small trial before hopefully going "run always" with a number of
> our users and wondered if anbody had already done such a trial or would be
> interested in the results of mine...

in addition to Ian's response

I often allow jobs to run on my machine overnight (dual Xeons, WinXP
and 2GB memory) and others in my team have it set to run overnight.
The jobs are very high CPU load (soak a single CPU fully for hours at
a time) but are not terribly onerous on the network or disk. Most take
around 400Mb, some can sometimes go as close to 2GB - all are .net
applications.

I find I am unaware I have them running in the background unless I try
to do something like a full build (where it tends to make it three
times slower or so.

I have set it on all the other's machines to preempt the instant they
touch the keyboard - On mine I simply don't let any more start. I find
I kill off one vm maybe 1 day in 10.

If you have jobs with  large memory usage or heavy disk load I would
expect that to be far more annoying to the users than CPU activity.

Previous experience with things like distributed.net leads me to say
that windows is well capable of handling a low priority low memory
footprint and disk activity app with the user never knowing (unless
this makes their fan run louder :)

Matt