Working with processes: nice and renice

nice changes the CPU priority of a given process. niceness ranges from -20 through +19; the lower the value, the higher the priority. Default niceness is 0.

me@locutus:~$ nice 10 /usr/lib/thunderbird-8.0/thunderbird-bin

me@locutus:~$ ps axl | head -n 1 ; ps axl | grep thunderbird | grep -v grep F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND 0 1000 2779 1 20 10 2323372 1247792 poll_s Sl ? 65:17 /usr/lib/thunderbird-8.0/thunderbird-bin

me@locutus:~$ sudo renice -5 -p 2779 2779 (process ID) old priority 0, new priority -5

me@locutus:~$ ps axl | head -n 1 ; ps axl | grep thunderbird | grep -v grep F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND 0 1000 2779 1 20 -5 2323372 1247792 poll_s Sl ? 65:17 /usr/lib/thunderbird-8.0/thunderbird-bin