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I'm having a hard time finding a purposeful need for using renice more often, and I would like to know if there are any scenarios in which using process prioritization and adjusting it on-the-fly has made it invaluable.

I just never came into a specific situation that told me I should consider 'renice'-ing a process.

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I suspect that the most common use case is when you start a program with the default priority, then realize that you meant to run it with a low priority.

renice can also be useful if there are certain times when you want to give certain programs a higher priority (e.g. to give the logged-in user's programs a higher priority than that of other users'), but that isn't so common because generally in this case it's enough to give the program a low priority: if there are no competing high-priority programs, low-priority programs get all the available CPU time anyway.

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Typically I've only looked at renice when there is a potentially long running process that could bog down the system. For instance when running ffmpeg video conversions I renice those processes so that it doesn't bog down apache for serving web requests. Now in a proper environment the ffmpeg conversions would be running on another server and could not impact apache but even then the video conversions would be long taxing processes which might still need to behave.

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