(PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
proc_nice — Change the priority of the current process
proc_nice() changes the priority of the current
process by the amount specified in priority. A
positive priority will lower the priority of the
current process, whereas a negative priority
will raise the priority.
proc_nice() is not related to proc_open() and its associated functions in any way.
priorityThe new priority value, the value of this may differ on platforms.
On Unix, a low value, such as -20 means high priority
whereas positive values have a lower priority.
For Windows the priority parameter has the
following meaning:
| Priority class | Possible values |
|---|---|
| High priority |
priority < -9
|
| Above normal priority |
priority < -4
|
| Normal priority |
priority < 5 &
priority > -5
|
| Below normal priority |
priority > 5
|
| Idle priority |
priority > 9
|
Returns true on success or false on failure.
If an error occurs, like the user lacks permission to change the priority,
an error of level E_WARNING is also generated.
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 7.2.0 | This function is now available on Windows. |
Example #1 Using proc_nice() to set the process priority to high
<?php
// Highest priority
proc_nice(-20);
?>Note: Availability
proc_nice() will only exist if your system has 'nice' capabilities. 'nice' conforms to: SVr4, SVID EXT, AT&T, X/OPEN, BSD 4.3.
Note: Windows only
proc_nice() will change the current process priority, even if PHP was compiled using thread safety.
On a Linux system, running apache2 as a non-privileged user you can not increase the niceness of the process after decreasing it. Also, you can not use the apache_child_ terminate either. I found the following does work though:<?php//decrease nicenessproc_nice(19);//kill child process to "reset" nicenessposix_kill( getmypid(), 28 );?>If a process is reniced, then all its children inherit that niceness. So a PHP script can call proc_nice on itself, then invoke system(), and the command executed via system() will also be niced.Also worth making a note of ionice. There's no PHP function for this, but it's important. A nice'd program will happily try to chew up all i/o bandwidth with very little CPU usage, it can therefore make the entire computer non-responsive despite the programmer's intention. Use "ionice -c3" or see "man ionice"Regarding ionice - on linux the impact of the ionice -c3 class is similar to that of nice, because the CPU "niceness" is taken into account when calculating the io niceness.It is important to note that this is a relative change. I didn't read the description properly and couldn't figure out why setting proc_nice(0) didn't take the forked children back to 0!For example if you run:<?phpproc_nice(-5);proc_nice(0); // will have no effectproc_nice(5); // will take the niceness back to 0 ?>In PHP CLI under Debian (and probably many other Linux flavours) you can read the 'niceness' from the proc filesystem. (There may be a PHP command that gives this info but there doesn't seem to be a link to it on this page.)E.g<?php$Current_Niceness_Value = intval(explode(" ",file_get_contents("/proc/".getmypid()."/stat"))[18]);// Note: Older versions of Linux return an unsigned integer which has to be converted to a signed integer. $Current_Niceness_Value = unpack("l",pack("L",intval(explode(" ",file_get_contents("/proc/".getmypid()."/stat"))[18])))[1];?>Simple function for check process nice, by default returns nice of current process:<?phppublic static function getProcessNice ($pid = null) { if (!$pid) { $pid = getmypid (); } $res = `ps -p $pid -o "%p %n"`; preg_match ('/^\s*\w+\s+\w+\s*(\d+)\s+(\d+)/m', $res, $matches); return array ('pid' => (isset ($matches[1]) ? $matches[1] : null), 'nice' => (isset ($matches[2]) ? $matches[2] : null));}?>