nice and ionice: which one should come first?

Question

I need to run some long and heavy commands but at the same time I'd like to keep my desktop system responsive. Examples: btrfs deduplication, btrfs balance, etc. I don't mind if such commands take longer to finish if I give them a lower priority, but my system should be responsive at all times. Using nice -n 19 and ionice -c 3 should solve my problem, but I'm not sure which command should come first for maximum benefit.

Option A:

# nice -n 19 ionice -c 3 btrfs balance start --full-balance /

Option B:

# ionice -c 3 nice -n 19 btrfs balance start --full-balance /

Is there some subtle difference between options A and B? Are they equivalent perhaps?

Answer 1

If nice caused lots of I/O, you would want to do:

ionice -c 3 nice ...

so that the impact of the I/O would be minimized.

Conversely, if ionice performed lots of computation, you would want to do

nice -n 19 ionice ...

to minimize its CPU impact.

But neither of these is true, they're both very simple commands (they just make a system call to change a process parameter, then execute the command). So the difference should be negligible.

And just to be complete, if both were true, you can't really win -- the impact of one of them can't be reduced.

Answer 2

There is no practical difference between the two.