O21int Small interactivity fix hto1 Hyperthread only tweaks for minor performance improvements and to add hyperthread awareness to "nice". batch6 Batch scheduling htb1 Hyperthread awareness for batch scheduling (requires batch6) am6 Autoregulate the vm_swappiness FAQ: Why do I need hyper-thread awareness for nice? If you have a hyperthread (P4HT) processor and run it as two logical cpus you can have a very low priority task running that can consume 50% of your physical cpu's capacity no matter how high priority tasks you are running. For example if you use the distributed computing client seti you will be effectively be running at half your cpu's speed even if you run seti nice 20. Hyperthread awareness prevents this by not allowing a significantly lower priority task (>10) to run on a cpu's hyperthread sibling. What's batch scheduling? Batch scheduling for normal cpus allows only idle time to be used for batch tasks rather than a percentage of the total cpu time. Hyperthread awareness for batch scheduling? Only allows batch tasks to run when both hyperthread siblings are idle. You can get the schedtools to make tasks batch scheduled here: http://freshmeat.net/projects/schedtool/?topic_id=136 It's safest to set tasks as batch after they are already running as signal handling within the kernel can cause problems with this batch scheduling.