How do I throttle a command in a terminal window?

Posted by To Do on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by To Do
Published on 2012-11-24T15:03:10Z Indexed on 2012/11/26 17:27 UTC
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disk-load

I needed to run convert with a lot of images at the same time. The command took quite a while but this doesn't bother me.

The issue is that this command rendered my computer unusable while the command was running (for about 15 minutes).

So is it possible to throttle the command by limiting resources (processor and memory) to the command, directly from the command line? This can only work if I add something to the same line before pressing Enter because once I start the process the computer slows so much that it is impossible for example to switch to "System monitor" and reduce priority.

Edit: top and iotop results

I managed to run top and sudo iotop >iotop.txt while doing one of these convert operations. (The iotop.txt file produced is difficult to read)

Results of top:

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
14275 username     20   0 4043m 3.0g 1448 D   7.0 80.4   0:16.45 convert

Results of iotop:

[?1049h[1;24r(B[m[4l[?7h[?1h=[39;49m[?25l[39;49m(B[m[H[2JTotal DISK READ:    1269.04 K/s | Total DISK WRITE:[59G0.00 B/s
(B[0;7m  TID  PRIO  USER     DISK READ  DISK WRITE  SWAPIN(B[0;1;7m     IO>(B[0;7m    COMMAND          [3;2H(B[m2516 be/4 username     350.08 K/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % zeitgeist-datahub
 7394 be/4 username     568.88 K/s    0.00 B/s 77.41 %  0.00 % --rendere~.530483991[5;1H14275 idle username     350.08 K/s    0.00 B/s 37.49 %  0.00 % convert S~f test.pdf[6;2H2048 be/4 root[6;24H0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [kworker/3:2]
[5G1 be/4 root[7;24H0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % init

Furthermore, even after the process ends, the computer does not return to the previous performance. I found a way around this by running sudo swapoff -a followed by sudo swapon -a

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