[geeks] rate-limiting disk i/o

[Mike Meredith]

On Wednesday 20 March 2002 11:06, you wrote:
> [NB - posted to two mailing lists, careful with them replies]
>
> Can anyone think of a way of 'nice'ing a process so that it doesn't
> hammer the disks?  nice only affects scheduling, but we *really* need
> to limit a process to just FOO% of disk i/o, or at least make it wait
> if another process wants the disk.

You've neglected to mention which flavour of Unix. The only thing that 
I know of that can do this is SGI's grio which guarantee's a certain 
rate with an optional limitation to that rate. And this functionality 
is limited to IRIX XFS filesystems, so no you can't cheat.