RE: best way to limit a job

I am trying to assuage a client's dissatisfaction that a particular job
is consuming the most CPU of all concurrent tasks. He feels it is
keeping other tasks from completing faster, or responding quicker.
I've already tried to explain that if the system has resources to give,
why not let it use it? If the task were not running the total CPU%
would go down but other tasks would not necessarily complete quicker.
The task already has a run priority of 75, lower than anything else
they are running, so this task should get paged out or delayed in some
way if another higher priority task needs the resources.

So, if I can simply limit the task to a ceiling of x%, I'm thinking
that might satisfy him.

Perhaps the client has a valid complaint? Sometimes when one smells smoke,
there's a raging fire nearby. I'm just saying.

Sounds like there are three actions you can take. First is education of the
client. Second was Chuck's reminder (I won't call it advice) that delays
can be purposely placed into the code to force reduced demand. Third is to
make the process run more efficiently.

I haven't seen the code; I cannot comment on which of these should be
tackled first.

But if it were me - I certainly wouldn't try to coerce _my_client's_system_
into not exposing my process as a hog. Instead, I would spend some quality
time investigating how I could make the process work more efficiently.
Maybe that's not possible - as I said, I haven't seen the code. In that
case, I would justify with the client the reason that the process requires
so much resource. Few clients are unreasonable when given the opportunity
to understand.

Dennis Lovelady
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dennislovelady
--
"Every time a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he
is writing so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of
trying to figure out what he said."
-- Will Rogers