How do I change priority in debian?

Question

I am using Raspbian, a Debian distro for the Raspberry Pi. I tried using the task manager but was unable to change the process priority (I was trying to decrease Python's priority). After decreasing the priority and checking again it remained at zero (no change). Is this because of me not being a superuser? If so how do I open the task manager GUI in sudo? If not what else could be the problem?

Answer 1

You should consider to use Terminal:

sudo top

this will show you the processes with pid

renice {priority} pid

this will change the priority (niceness) of the process. The nicer the process is, the lower priority it will have. It's nicer because leave its time-slot to other processes ;-)

{priority} is from -20 to 19

Answer 2

Find the process id (using ps aux|grep 'your_process')

Use renice command

$sudo renice -n <nice_value> -p <PID>

Answer 3

xrenice, like xkill lets you to renice priority by one click on app. On GitHub - https://github.com/firebbs/xrenice