LOADWATCH(1)

💖 LOADWATCH 💖

okay bestie, welcome to loadwatch(1) — the iconic little tool that runs your program when the machine is idle. she's a whole vibe manager for your CPU. ✨

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

loadwatch [options] -p pid | [--] prog [args]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea. loadwatch does one of two things:

• she spawns a child process prog with the arguments args, and controls it — with all its process group 🫶
• or she takes control of an already-running process with pid pid — also with all its process group 💅

and then? she lets the controlled processes run while the load average stays below high_limit. Every delay seconds, loadwatch does a lil vibe check on the load average. If the load is above high_limit, the child gets suspended 😭. Then she's resumed when the load falls below low_limit. it's giving responsible babysitter, ngl. 🎀

🔥 OPTIONS 🔥

a summary of options is included below. no cap, here's the whole menu:

• -h high_limit — a decimal value that sets the system load at which the child process will be suspended. (Default: 1.25)
• -l low_limit — a decimal value that sets the system load at which the child process will be resumed. (Default: 0.25)
• -d delay — an integral number of seconds that sets how often the system load will be checked. (Default: 10)
• -n copies — an integer value that sets the number of copies of prog to run. (Default: 1)
• -u file — create a UNIX domain socket file for use by lw-ctl. 🦋
• -p pid — the pid of the program that should be controlled by loadwatch (with all its process group).

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

lw-ctl(1), nice(1)

💀 BUGS 💀

bestie. listen. choose low_limit and high_limit carefully. when the load drops below low_limit, the process(es) will be resumed — and that resume should not, by itself, cause the load to raise above high_limit, or the whole thing will oscillate, periodically suspending and resuming the process(es). it's giving yoyo. 🪀

similarly, if several instances of loadwatch are running, they may resume their processes at the same time, leading to oscillations if the limits are not carefully chosen. hence, each instance of loadwatch affects every other instance on the computer, and should not be considered in isolation. fr fr. 🙈

👑 AUTHOR 👑

this manual page was written by Dale E. Martin <dmartin@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). It was then updated by Nicolas Boullis <nboullis@debian.org>. shoutout to the legends 🫶✨

July 2003 — yeah this page is a vintage queen 👑 and she belongs to loadwatch(1), General Commands Manual. mwah, thanks for reading, go keep that load average cute. 💅💖