What Is a Nice Value?

A nice value is a number that influences a process scheduling priority, where a more positive value makes the process nicer by claiming less CPU when there is contention. The scheduler uses it to weight how often each runnable process is chosen. Lowering niceness, which usually needs privilege, makes a process more aggressive.

Why it matters

Running a heavy background task at higher niceness keeps it from starving the foreground build on a shared runner. It is a simple lever for balancing competing workloads on one machine.

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