Wait nice actionscript

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The “Run Capacity Scan and Upload Results (11.0.4.0)” in the BigFix Inventory site has actionscript commands of:

“wait nice -n 10”

I’m very familiar with the ‘wait’ actionscript command but what is ‘nice -n 10’ ? I see no reference to it documented here: https://developer.bigfix.com/action-script/reference/execution/wait.html

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Is that inside an if statement for Unix operating systems?

nice is a standard ‘nix command for setting process priority.

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ah right. the wait command is calling nice -n 10 sh -c …
An interesting way for the BigFix Inventory Run Capacity scan to utilize more CPU than the normal bounds set by the BES Client settings.

thanks

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So are we saying that this could over ride caps set on scans if used there?

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This is specifically the ‘Capacity’ scan, not the ‘installed software’ scan (cit)

The ‘Capacity’ scan should be a pretty low-impact scan, run every 30 minutes I think, that just collects the number & sizes of processors and RAM on the machine. I think the intent is to validate for Sub-Capacity Licensing, where one might license an IBM product to run virtually on a subset of processors, i.e. licensed to run on 4 cores out of a 64-core machine, that customers are complying with the limited CPU licensing.

While the command should already be fast and low-impact, it is also being launched with ‘nice’ to run at an even lower-than-usual priority compared to other processes on the system.

A good reference is at Nice and Renice Command in Linux with Examples - GeeksforGeeks
Basically, lower numbers run at a higher priority / get more CPU time, with the range of -20 to 19 with a default of ‘0’. So we’re running this command at a priority of “10x slower than usual”

The “Initiate Software Scan” has its own configurable priority, that can be set on the ‘Description’ tab.

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The ‘Capacity’ scan should be a pretty low-impact scan, run every 30 minutes I think, that just collects the number & sizes of processors and RAM on the machine. I think the intent is to validate for Sub-Capacity Licensing, where one might license an IBM product to run virtually on a subset of processors, i.e. licensed to run on 4 cores out of a 64-core machine, that customers are complying with the limited CPU licensing.

That is the intent of the this scan. It is frequent in order to capture the migration of virtual machines from one host to another, where the hosts’ CPU count might vary.

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