Runing a nightly backup script on a server system like a webhosting server can produce high load and longer latencys for other processes, e.g. HTML or .php pages load slow during backup because the backup script takes too much I/O or CPU resources.
On Linux systems there are two shell utilitys available to set the I/O and CPU Scheduling for a appliaction or script. The utilitys are named nice and ionice.
Reduce the I/O priority of the script "/usr/local/bin/backup.sh" so that it does not disrupt other processes:
/usr/bin/ionice -c2 -n7 /usr/local/bin/backup.sh
The -n parameter must be between 0 and 7, where lower numbers mean higher priority.
To reduce the CPU priority, use the command nice:
/usr/bin/nice -n 19 /usr/local/bin/backup.sh
The -n parameter can range from -20 to 19, where lower numbers mean higher priority
Nice and ionice can also be combined, to run a script at low I/O and CPU priority:
/usr/bin/nice -n 19 /usr/bin/ionice -c2 -n7 /usr/local/bin/backup.sh
