CGroups?

[PhysicistSarah]

I'm having a bit of trouble gettings the hang of cgroups and have been following this tutorial: https://www.devinhoward.ca/technolog...untu-or-debian

I'm trying to limit the CPU usage of handbrake (It uses a lot of CPU, and setting the niceness and IO values via System Monitor only goes so far).

What would be the best way to limit the CPU and I/O useage of the handbrake process?

So far I've done:

sudo cgcreate -a sarah -t sarah -g cpu:limitgroup
echo 512 > cpu/limitgroup/cpu.shares
cgexec -g cpu:limitgroup handbrake

But this hasn't been very effective, and it's still using above 80% CPU for some reason.

I also don't really understand what I'm doing exactly.

For example:

:limitgroup

I'm not sure what this does.

How can I limit handbrake's CPU and I/O usage to 50% using cgroups?

[jglen490]

I'm no expert on cgroups, but my question to you would be what problem are you trying solve?
- Handbrake intermittently taking 80% of CPU?
- Handbrake constantly taking 80% of CPU?
- Handbrake keeping other processes from starting?
- General freezing conditions with your PC?

I looked at the cgroups man page, until my eyes started to water. So let's start with problem solving and define the problem(s) that you observe Handbrake causing.

[PhysicistSarah]

@jglen490 I had a similar experience.

Handbrake making firefox Youtube videos unstable is my main issue.

I set the niceness values to their lowest using system monitor (It's a CPU issue, not a disk issue, verified by iotop).

When the handbrake conversions are running I can't watch anything basically. The video drops frames like crazy when I do that.

[jglen490]

Sorry, I've never tried Handbrake on YouTube videos. I've only used it to rip DVD to disk.

Maybe if you could describe your process to bring the YouTube into HB, that might help.

[Don B. Cilly]

Surely what the OP means is that when Handbrake is running in the background, CPU usage can't be set to "nice" in a way that would allow tasks like watching a video?

[SpecialEd]

There comes a point when one has to either upgrade their hardware or schedule their viewing/transcoding activities.

[vinnywright]

have you tried starting handbrake with

nice -n 19 handbrake

ps: nice values are

Niceness values range from -20
(most favorable to the process) to 19 (least favorable to the process).

VINNY