powernowd ignores niced xine

[Manoj Kasichainula]

xine seems to nice itself sometimes (total guess: when it thinks there isn't
enough CPU, it nices the threads that aren't as timing-critical). powernowd
ignores niced processes by default. So sometimes (I think when powernowd speeds
up fast enough), xine works fine on video that needs lots of CPU, e.g. hi-def
video, and sometimes it nices itself, and powernowd ignores it, so the video
gets very slow.

Barring a change to xine, I fixed this by adding -n to /etc/default/powernowd,
which tells it to count niced processes in its evaluations. I can see arguments
for and against this, but it's perfect for my usage.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

I don't see anyplace in xine where it raises its nice value. If it's running as
root, it will try to lower it, but presumably you aren't running it as root, and
even if you were, that wouldn't trigger powernowd's logic.

Perhaps something else is nicing it? In any case, I think that nicing parts of
xine is not a very good idea, and whatever is doing it should stop.

[Tollef Fog Heen (tfheen)]

This is not a bug in powernow, if anything, it's a bug in xine, but as Matt says, it doesn't.

Please try to track down what is changing the nice value and file a bug against that component.

[Manoj Kasichainula (manoj+ubuntu-com)]

hahaha, ok figured this one out, and for the record, no, it's not a xine problem.

zsh nices backgrounded processes by default, and my .Xclients (which is a zsh
script) started backgrounded xterms out of which I ran xine.

So yeah, NOTABUG is correct. Sorry for the mixup.