xyproto / easy

:shaved_ice: nice and ionice combined to a single utility, written in pure Go

Easy

Easy implements the functionality of both nice and ionice without using C.

It's also a drop-in replacement for ionice (from util-linux).

• Easy started out as a port of ionice to Go, but more functionality has been added since then.
• Easy can also be used to give applications increased I/O priority or niceness.
• Easy may be useful for running ie. Zoom or Chromium on desktop Linux, with a lower I/O priority.

Example use

Run chromium in a very relaxed way (nice both in terms of CPU usage and in terms of I/O usage):

easy -c3 -N chromium

The same as above, but with the easier to remember --both or -b flag:

easy -b chromium

Differences from ionice

These flags are for adjusting the process niceness (from nice not ionice):

• -N or --nice can be used to also set the process niceness to 10 (same as nice COMMAND).
• -s or --setnice can be used to set the process niceness.
• -a or --adjustment can be used to adjust the process niceness by the given offset.

Related projects

• ionice from util-linux.
• nice from coreutils.
• tinyionice is a fork of ionice, in only 300 lines of C.
• gionice is a Go module where the core functionality of the ionice utility has been ported to Go.

Why

This port exists mainly because I wanted to have a Go module for changing the I/O priority of servers written in Go. It was relatively easy to add a port of the ionice utility as well, once that was done.

Requirements

• A recent Go compiler.
• Linux.

Build

go build -mod=vendor

Install

install -Dm755 easy /usr/bin/easy
gzip easy.1
install -Dm644 easy.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1/easy.1.gz

Dev install with Go 1.17 or later

go install github.com/xyproto/easy@latest

General info

• Version: 1.5.0
• Licence: GPL2

easy's Issues

Rename project to spoon

Just like a process can be forked, it would be nice if a process could be spooned and take it easy.