This is a new series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’ll be covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. There’s a complete list of the tools in this series in the Summary section.
It’s possible to grant more importance to a process, giving it more time on the CPU. This property of a process is called niceness. A process with high priority is said to be less nice because it’s taking more of the CPU’s time, which leaves less for everything else. Alternatively, a process with low priority (a “nice” process) gets processor time only after other processes with higher priority have been serviced.
Prioritize applications’ CPU and IO scheduling is a good way to improve performance on what really matters. This can be actioned per command with nice and ionice commands, but there’s a better way. Ananicy is a shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities, with community-driven set of rules for popular applications.
It’s free and open source software written in Python.
Installation
Let’s clone the project’s repository, compile, and install the system with a few simple commands:
$ cd Ananicy
$ sudo make install
If you want to create your own Debian package, replace sudo make install with make deb.
You’ll find packages for Ananicy in many popular Linux distributions.
You’ll need schedtool installed on your system. This is a utility that sets all CPU scheduling parameters.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Excellent Utilities | |
|---|---|
| tmux | A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow |
| lnav | Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting |
| Paperwork | Designed to simplify the management of your paperwork |
| Abricotine | Markdown editor with inline preview functionality |
| mdless | Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files |
| fkill | Kill processes quick and easy |
| Tusk | An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential |
| Ulauncher | Sublime application launcher |
| McFly | Navigate through your bash shell history |
| LanguageTool | Style and grammar checker for 30+ languages |
| peco | Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful |
| Liquid Prompt | Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh |
| Ananicy | Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities |
| cheat.sh | Community driven unified cheat sheet |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern |
| exa | A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command |
| OCRmyPDF | Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs |
| Watson | Track the time spent on projects |
| fontpreview | Quickly search and preview fonts |
| fd | Wonderful alternative to the venerable find |
| scrcpy | Display and control Android devices |
| duf | Disk usage utility with more polished presentation than the classic df |
| tldr | Simplified and community-driven man pages |