Logcheck devel - Jul 2009 - Bug#535562: logcheck runs at normal I/O priority, and is hard-coded to nice -n10

Package: logcheck
Version: 1.2.69
Severity: normal

logcheck is a "batchy" job, but currently runs at normal I/O priority,
and is hard-coded to run with a niceness of 10.  As a result logcheck
can degrade interactive performance on machines with a lot of log
traffic, relatively slow CPU or expensive I/O.

It'd be useful if the "ionice" and "schedtool" utilities
could be used to
provide more fine-grained control of the CPU and disk I/O priority of
logcheck (e.g. default to "idle" or "batch" priorities). 
This could be
configurable using the debconf mechanisms.

If this is accepted as a bug, I can try and work on an acceptable
patch...

Thanks,

Tim.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.2
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB, LC_CTYPE=en_GB (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages logcheck depends on:
ii  adduser            3.110                 add and remove users and groups
ii  bsd-mailx [mailx]  8.1.2-0.20071201cvs-3 A simple mail user agent
ii  cron               3.0pl1-105            management of regular background p
ii  lockfile-progs     0.1.11-0.1            Programs for locking and unlocking
ii  logtail            1.2.69                Print log file lines that have not
ii  mailx              1:20071201-3          Transitional package for mailx ren
ii  postfix [mail-tran 2.5.5-1.1             High-performance mail transport ag
ii  rsyslog [system-lo 3.18.6-4              enhanced multi-threaded syslogd

Versions of packages logcheck recommends:
ii  logcheck-database             1.3.1      database of system log rules for t

Versions of packages logcheck suggests:
pn  syslog-summary                <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information

also sprach Tim Small <tim at buttersideup.com> [2009.07.03.1148
+0200]:
> It'd be useful if the "ionice" and "schedtool"
utilities could be used to
> provide more fine-grained control of the CPU and disk I/O priority of
> logcheck (e.g. default to "idle" or "batch"
priorities).  This could be
> configurable using the debconf mechanisms.
> 
> If this is accepted as a bug, I can try and work on an acceptable
> patch...
It's hard to say that this will be accepted, but the problem you
describe is real. So I'd say you should work on the patch. ;)

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at d.o>      Related projects:
: :'  :  proud Debian developer               http://debiansystem.info
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck    http://vcs-pkg.org
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
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