RFR: JDK-8138864 Build with nice to lower UI impact

[Erik Joelsson]

By at least making sure that works, I'm happy with this for now.

/Erik

On 2015-10-05 13:17, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
> On 2015-10-05 11:31, Erik Joelsson wrote:
>> Looks ok to me, but I suspect someone will be asking for an explicit 
>> way of disabling this soon.
> I was just about to reply "just use configure NICE=", but then I had 
> to go and check that it worked. It didn't. So, here's an updated patch 
> that allow you to override a configure located executable (such as 
> nice) with an empty value. The changes are in basics.4m.
>
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~ihse/JDK-8138864-make-nice-priority/webrev.02
>
> With this additional fix, you can use "configure NICE=" to disable the 
> use of nice.
>
> /Magnus
>
>>
>> /Erik
>>
>> On 2015-10-05 11:21, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
>>> Since building the OpenJDK is a heavy operation, the build system 
>>> tries to make use as of much of the system resources as possible and 
>>> reasonable.
>>>
>>> However, on most machines except extremely high-end, this means that 
>>> few resources are available for other processes. On a developer 
>>> machine, building means that other work can get laggy and have poor 
>>> response times.
>>>
>>> There is a simple remedy for this! Using "nice" to lower the 
>>> priority for the build process, so the build will wait for normal UI 
>>> processes. A single "nice" when handling the parallel targets in 
>>> Init.gmk is sufficient.
>>>
>>> A potential problem could be if this affects performance on 
>>> dedicated build servers. I have checked this on Oracle's internal 
>>> build system, and there were no measurable regressions. This also 
>>> stands to reason, since if there would be, the build server would be 
>>> running other processes competing with the build. On a correctly 
>>> setup build server, this should not be the case. And if such 
>>> processes existed, it would be bad anyway.
>>>
>>> Bug: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8138864
>>> WebRev: 
>>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~ihse/JDK-8138864-make-nice-priority/webrev.01
>>>
>>> /Magnus
>>>
>>
>