SOLVED: How can you set high priority on "games" permanently?

I had question to ask, and is if there is a way to set steam games (more specifically the games themselves, that shows up as launchers or releases; example: payday2_release) in high priority permanently, or at least to set it on high priority every time i launch the game without having to manually open the system monitor.

2 Answers

It seems you are able of detecting your process and changing its priority using "Gnome system monitor", when you are changing a process priority you are actually changing its nice level. A nice level can be between "-20" highest priority and "19" the lowest.

so we should somehow renice (change the nice level) the game process.

You can simply use other answer suggestion and use renice command to do it, however there are other options too.

reniced

one is to use reniced to install it use:

sudo apt install reniced

then you can use regular expression to define rules in this file:

/etc/reniced.conf

You can add something like:

-20n ^game-process

change "game-process" with your game's process, now whenever you run sudo reniced it's going to renice all process defined in /etc/reniced.conf.

and

the other option is to use and to install it:

sudo apt install and

It's job is to activates itself in certain intervals and renices process according to their priority and CPU usage. [read manual]

5

renice

You can try to use renice, that must be run with superuser privileges in order to give it higher priority. See

man renice

for details

NOTES Users other than the superuser may only alter the priority of processes they own, and can only monotonically increase their ``nice value'' (for security reasons) within the range 0 to 19, unless a nice resource limit is set (Linux 2.6.12 and higher). The superuser may alter the priority of any process and set the priority to any value in the range -20 to 19. Useful priorities are: 19 (the affected processes will run only when nothing else in the system wants to), 0 (the ``base'' sched‐ uling priority), anything negative (to make things go very fast).

Examples

I don't know how the steam games are called, but the following two examples may help you set up aliases, functions or shellscripts to start the games with higher priority. Please avoid too high priority, because it can cause problems for the operating system. Maybe you can use -10 (0 is the standard priority and -20 is the highest priority).

xterm with top

xterm -e top & pid=$!;sudo renice -9 $pid

htop

sudo apt-get install htop # install htop
htop & pid=$!;sudo renice -10 $pid;fg

Making things convenient

You can create an alias, function or shellscript in order to make it convenient to run tasks, that you intend to run often.

alias

The following command will create the alias hht (think High priority HTop; but check first that there is no other command with the same name),

alias hht='htop & pid=$!;sudo renice -10 $pid;fg'

After that it is enough to use the short command

hht

to run htop with the nice value -10, which means high priority. Maybe it will work well with the following alias, pd2, to run your steam game

alias pd2='payday2_release & pid=$!;sudo renice -10 $pid;fg'

So you can test what happens, when you launch the command with the nice value -10,

pd2

I have not got that game, so I can not test it myself. Maybe you need to add, change or remove something to make it work as intended. Maybe you should modify the nice value.

When you have an alias that works, you can store it in the file ~/.bashrc, your running conditions file for the bash shell. Edit the file and insert the alias line near the other aliases and save the file. After that your new alias will be available in new terminals (terminal windows), that you open.

If you need a more complicated set of commands, it might be necessary (or easier) to use a function or shellscript instead of an alias. But in this case I think it works well enough to use an alias.

6

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