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NICE/2

What is NICE/2?

Have you ever started a long XCOPY command that ate too much CPU? Have you ever wanted to make Netscape/2 more responsive? NICE/2 is here to rescue. With NICE/2 you can dynamically change the priority of many processes in OS/2. As opposed to programs such as SPE that starts a process in a given priority, NICE/2 enables you to change the priority of processes and threads after they have been started.

Jump to [Installation] [Basic] [Advanced] [Known Problems] [Error codes]

Installation

Simply copy NICE.EXE and NICED.EXE to somewhere in your PATH, and copy NICE.DLL, NICEDHK.DLL and NICEDMN.DLL to somewhere in your LIBPATH. A typical place will be your utility directory.

Basic

NICE/2 is deviced into three components: Server, GUI Client and Command Line client. To start using NICE/2, the server must be running. To start the server, issue the command:

niced.exe -start

This will attempt to start the server. If everything went ok, niced.exe quietly returns. If the server could not be started, niced.exe reports the error and aborts the operation. To find out if the server is running or not, issue:

niced.exe

This will tell you if the server is running or not. To stop the server, issue:

niced.exe -stop

This will attempt to stop the server. This might take a few seconds. If the server was successfully stopped, niced.exe quietly returns. If an error occurred while stopping the server, niced.exe reports the error but still stops the server.

If you intend to use NICE/2 a lot, start the server in your STARTUP.CMD or STARTUP folder. NICE/2 takes only a fraction of OS/2 resources, so there's really no good reason against it.

After the server has been started, NICE/2 inserts a new submenu into the Task List Window (TLW) context menu. This submenu enables you to interact with the NICE/2 server. The menu looks like this:

[figure 1 - Priority menu]

To get this menu, simply select a program from the Task List Menu and bring up the context menu (usualy Right-Mouse-Button). If you select more than one program, or the program that you have selected is a Workplace Shell Object (such as Folders, WarpCenter etc) the Priority menu will not be displayed.

When you apply a priority change to a process, the NICE/2 server will alter the priority of all threads within that process.