Automatic Priority Daemon

Aprio was developed to enable systems administrators to automatically renice abusive, long running, CPU intensive processes. In a shared high-computing environment, users may feel it is necessary to "compete" with each other's programs, which often times leads to kernel load averages far exceeding an individual server's capabilities.

Usage Output

usage: aprio.py [-h] [--daemon] [--logfile LOGFILE] [--user USER]
                [--cpu-threshold CPU_THRESHOLD]
                [--cputime-threshold CPUTIME_THRESHOLD]
                [--load-threshold LOAD_THRESHOLD] [--time-scale TIME_SCALE]
                [--poll POLL] [--test] [--verbose] [--quiet]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --daemon, -d          Fork into background (default: False)
  --logfile LOGFILE, -L LOGFILE
                        Log output to filename (default: None)
  --user USER, -u USER  Limit to specific user (default: None)
  --cpu-threshold CPU_THRESHOLD, -c CPU_THRESHOLD
                        Trigger after n% (default: 50.0)
  --cputime-threshold CPUTIME_THRESHOLD, -t CPUTIME_THRESHOLD
                        Trigger after {n}{smdwMy} (default: 30m)
  --load-threshold LOAD_THRESHOLD, -l LOAD_THRESHOLD
                        Trigger after n load average (default: 4)
  --time-scale TIME_SCALE, -s TIME_SCALE
                        Scale by which nice values are calculated {n}{smdwMy}
                        (default: 1w)
  --poll POLL, -p POLL  Wait n seconds between polling processes (default: 3)
  --test, -T            Do not modify processes; report only. (default: False)
  --verbose, -v         Verbose output (default: False)
  --quiet, -q           Suppress output (default: False)

Examples

As a daemon process

aprio --daemon --cpu-threshold=85.0 --cputime-threshold=2h --load-threshold=10.0 --time-scale=2w

As a foreground process

The default loglevel is INFO. Aprio will only report changes to process priority.

aprio --cpu-threshold=85.0 --cputime-threshold=2h --load-threshold=10.0 --time-scale=2w
INFO:2014-04-14 09:31:18,872:renice:13481:Priority modified (0 -> 20)

Controlling a single user

The --user or -u argument allows you to target a user's processes.

aprio --user=foo --cpu-threshold=85.0 --cputime-threshold=2h --load-threshold=10.0 --time-scale=2w