reducing scheduling time of a single process

Question

I have a process that is mining a private blockchain and it takes 100% of the CPU. I don't need that much computing power for this, so in order to reduce my energy bill I need to configure this particular process to be scheduled only once in a while to achieve around 10% consumption of the CPU.

How do I reduce the timeslice that a particular process is getting ?

Answer 1

You can try to use tools like cpulimit (normally should be available in repos of popular distros). It allows to limit the CPU usage by percentage, which might be more convenient.

Otherwise you might want to control it via cgroups-tools and set the limit with cgcreate / cgset. You need to adjust values cpu.cfs_period_us and cpu.cfs_quota_us.

Answer 2

#!/bin/bash
#reduces consumption to 10% CPU using `sleep`s
GETH_PID=$1
if [ "$GETH_PID" == "" ] ; then
    echo usage $0 GETH_PID
    exit
fi
while true
do
    kill -STOP $GETH_PID
    sleep 9
    kill -CONT $GETH_PID
    sleep 1
done