Being nice

For jobs that are not submitted to Slurm, we have the agreement to use the "nice -n 19" command:

  nice -n 19 job.sh

This way, your processes have the higher 'nice' value of 19 instead of the default 0, which means they are lower priority (=are nicer). This way, if other users have a pressing reason for their jobs to finish quickly, they can simply make their jobs a little less and take over a pony without having to wait for existing processes to finish. Also, using high nice values prevents your jobs from interfering with Slurm.

On other server parks, you can sometimes also use negative nice values for higher priorities, but this is not allowed on Ponyland. Do not confuse this with the shorthand nice -19 job.sh where the dash indicates the flag '19', not the negative sign.

For multi-threaded jobs, please use Slurm while submitting your jobs. This is detailed Slurm.