Process Priority

Process priority is -20 to 19 where -20 is highest… Normal user can change the process priority from 0 to 19.

renice -10 -p "process id"

Process ID priority will change after some time due scheduling policy

The scheduling policy is also based on ranking processes according to their priority. Complicated algorithms are sometimes used to derive the current priority of a process, but the end result is the same: each process is associated with a value that denotes how appropriate it is to be assigned to the CPU.

In Linux, process priority is dynamic. The scheduler keeps track of what processes are doing and adjusts their priorities periodically; in this way, processes that have been denied the use of the CPU for a long time interval are boosted by dynamically increasing their priority. Correspondingly, processes running for a long time are penalized by decreasing their priority.

When speaking about scheduling, processes are traditionally classified as "I/O-bound" or "CPU-bound." The former make heavy use of I/O devices and spend much time waiting for I/O operations to complete; the latter are number-crunching applications that require a lot of CPU time.