Is there a utility better than 'nice'?

[Barbara Chapman]

Is there a common utility for preventing large hungry programs from
interfering with interactive users?  'Nice', even at its maximum, does
not keep large simulations from making interactive jobs MUCH slower
than they would otherwise be.

Ideally, a utility could stop (as with ^Z) such large jobs whenever
there was ANY csh or sh that was not idle, and would reawaken them (as
'bg' does) when all shells were idle or when no shells were running.
In that case, the stopped jobs would occupy only swap space,
eventually, and cause no interference with otherwise moderately loaded
machines.

I believe that it would not be hard to write such a utility, but it
seems difficult to believe that such a thing does not already exist.
If you have such a utility, could you please e-mail me a copy rather
than posting it to the newsgroup.  I will post a summary of what I
receive that is useful, along with any programs (or scripts??) that do
the job.  Our machines are MicroVAXen with 11-13 Mbytes memory and
plenty of swap space running Ultrix 2.0 (soon to be 3.0).

	Michael Stryker (stryker at cca.ucsf.edu or stryker at ucsfcca.bitnet).