loadwatch either spawns a child process prog with the
arguments args and controls it with all its process group, or
takes control of an already running process with pid pid with all
its process group.
loadwatch allows the controlled processes to run while the load
average remains below high_limit. Every delay seconds,
loadwatch checks the load average. If the load is above
high_limit, the child is suspended; the child is resumed when the
load falls below low_limit.
OPTIONS
A summary of options is included below.
-hhigh_limit
A decimal value that sets the system load at which the child process will
be suspended. (Default: 1.25)
-llow_limit
A decimal value that sets the system load at which the child process will
be resumed. (Default: 0.25)
-ddelay
An integral number of seconds that sets how often the system load will
be checked. (Default: 10)
-ncopies
An integer value that sets the number of copies of prog to
run. (Default: 1)
-ufile
Create a UNIX domain socket file for use by lw-ctl.
-ppid
The pid of the program that should be controlled by loadwatch
(with all its process group).
You should choose low_limit and high_limit carefully. When
the load drops below low_limit, the process(es) will be resumed,
and it should not, by itself, cause the load to raise above
high_limit, or the whole will oscillate, periodically suspending
and resuming the process(es).
Similarly, if several instances of loadwatch are running, they may
resume their processes at the same time, leading to oscillations if the
limits are not carefully chosen. Hence, each instance of loadwatch
affects every other instance on the computer, and should not be
considered in isolation.
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Dale E. Martin <dmartin@debian.org>,
for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). It was
then updated by Nicolas Boullis <nboullis@debian.org>.