CFQ I/O disk elevator includes a tool called ionice which helps the administrator to assign priorities on a process level to speed up or to restrict the disk subsystem utilization of a specific process. For example if you want to run a rsync command or script to backup your files either locally or remotely just use ionice alone with the rsync syntax to speed up or restrict the rsync process.
Note : ionice is packed with util-linux rpm.
Ionice priorities
IDLE : A process with the assigned I/O priority idle will only be granted access to the disk subsystems if no other processes with a priority of best-effort or higher request access to data. Very useful to run tasks suck as updatedb.
BEST-EFFORT: As a default all processes that do not request a specific I/O priority are assigned to this class. Processes will inherit 8 levels of the priority of their respective CPU nice level to the I/O priority class.
REAL TIME: The highest available I/O priority is real time meaning that the respective process will always be given priority access to the disk subsystem. The real time priority setting can also accept 8 priority levels.
The ionice tool accepts the following options:
-c I/O priority1 for real time, 2 for best-effort, 3 for idle
-n I/O priority class data 0 to 7
-p process id of a running task, use without -p to start a task with the respective I/O priority
Ionice examples
To assign an idle I/O priority to the running process with the PID for example 2939.
# ionice -c3 -p2939
To start an command/process with idle I/O priority (for example updatedb)
# ionice -c3 updatedb &
Speeding up the disk dumps using best effort scheduling (2) and 7 priority
# ionice -c2 -n7 PID (or) /path/backupscript.sh
Once you have scheduled the I/O priority you can check it using (for example PID 2939)
# ionice -p 2939
