Priority and nice

I have a cron job to run mysqldump through bzip2. The problem is that it interferes with my webserver when it runs. I've used renice to set the NICE values of bzip2 and mysqldump to 18. I still get no response from apache though. What can I do?

Sorry i'm a lot late replying, I don't check the BSD forum much, but I noticed you still don't have an answer. You could lower apache's nice to give it some more CPU time. Keeping something in the negative nice certainly makes the scheduler take notice.

The other thing you could do is find another way of dumping the database and zipping it. If you could do it in many chunks, for example, it wouldn't cause apache so many problems as a long running job since there are breaks for it to catch up in between.