Hello,

We have 2 40GB harddrives (7200rpm for accounts and 5400rpm for backup) in one of our servers and we setup CPanel to do daily backups. The problem is that when the backup process starts, the server becomes very slow and hardly usable. Is there anyway to set the backup process to lower priority so that it does not interfere with server performance?

Yes there is. It works quite well with other situations, but I've never tried it with this particular application. There is a "nice" system call (refer to nice() man pages). Only the superuser can do this and you need to know the pid of the process you want to change.

Thank you wave. I will look into it.

Has anyone tired wave's suggestion or knows of other ways to accomplish this?

nice will work, but how to tell Cpanel to use it?

nice will work, but how to tell Cpanel to use it?

I am sorry if I confused you Walter. :) You don't need to tell Cpanel because the system's process scheduler will take care of it. What I meant to say last time was to use the renice command that is related to nice. You can use renice at the command line to change the priority of a running process. All you need to know is the pid of that process which you can do a ps and find out.