[Techtalk] limits.conf, ionice, top, and befuddlements

[Carla Schroder]

hey all, 

As usual, I am dazed and confused. In /etc/security/limits.conf I have these 
entries:

@audio - rtprio 99
@audio - memlock 3000000
@audio - nice -19

My user 'alrac' is a member of the audio group. The idea is to give high 
scheduling priority for audio production. As I understand it, any process 
that alrac owns will have these priorities and memlock limit. (There are 4GB 
of RAM, so setting aside 3GB for the audio group means they are locked into 
that limit, and cannot write to swap.)

But when I run top or ionice, neither the nice or priority values look right:

$ top
PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3236 alrac     20   0  672m  34m  22m S    2  0.9   0:01.17 audacity

A PR value of 20 and a NI value of 0 mean "no special values applied." 
Shouldn't they say 99 and -19?

ionice doesn't think Audacity is special either:

$ ionice -p 3236
none: prio 0

pulseaudio has its own user, pulse, which is in the audio group:

$ ionice -p 3253
none: prio 4

So why does it have a priority of 4?

I am mightily baffled.

thanks,
Carla
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