[CentOS] Control IO related to a process

Lorenzo Quatrini wrote:

> As I was told few days ago you cold nice the whole process, eg.
>
> nice 19 if=/xxx of=/xxx bs=nnn
>
> This should give all the other process priority over dd

nice doesn't really do anything with respect to I/O.

The best way to control I/O in this manor is to physically
isolate it from the rest of the system(be it on a different
controller connected to different disks etc).

There's no real way in software that I'm aware of to prevent one
process from bogging down the whole system by consuming all of
the I/O capacity.

This would likely require process-level information on I/O
transactions, which I've never seen in Linux. I've heard it's
available in Solaris though (not sure if any sort of I/O QoS
is available in Solaris haven't used it in years).

nate