Question
A Linux systems administrator is running an important maintenance task that consumes a large amount of CPU, causing other applications to slow. Which of the following actions should the administrator take to help alleviate the issue?
- A. Increase the available CPU time with pidstat.
- B. Lower the priority of the maintenance task with renice. Correct
- C. Run the maintenance task with nohup.
- D. Execute the other applications with the bg utility.
Explanation
renice changes the nice value of a running process, so raising the nice value of the maintenance task lowers its scheduling priority and gives other applications more CPU time while the task still completes. pidstat only reports per-process statistics and cannot add CPU time. nohup only keeps a process running after the terminal closes, and bg only moves a stopped job to the background; neither changes CPU priority.
