Terminal

If you're at a terminal you can use renice

renice [-n] priority [[-p] pid ...] [[-g] pgrp ...] [[-u] user ...]

A simple example would be

renice 8 31043
31043: old priority 5, new priority 8

You can also pass it hard flags, but it follows that order (you have to pass priority first and then the pid - if you change the order it will show the usage messagge)

renice -n 5 -p 31043
31043: old priority 8, new priority 5

Priorities work on a scale of -20 to 19 - The lower the number, the higher it's priority on the system.

If you own the process then you won't need root - however, if the process is owned by another user or if you plan on changing the group/user of the process root (via sudo) will be required.

If you have only one java instance running, simply:

renice -n 5 -p $(pgrep ^java$)

• $(pgrep ^java$): command substitution; bash replaces this with the output of pgrep ^java$; pgrep ^java$ returns the list of PIDs of the processes whose name matches the regular expression ^java$, which matches all processes whose name is exactly java

If you have multiple java instances running:

for p in $(pgrep ^java$); do renice -n 5 -p $p; done

• for p in $(pgrep ^java$); do renice -n 5 -p $p; done: almost the same as above; $(pgrep ^java$) is a command substitution; bash replaces this with the output of pgrep ^java$; pgrep ^java$ returns the list of PIDs of the processes whose name matches the regular expression ^java$, which matches all processes whose name is exactly java; this is expanded into the for loop, which assigns a new line of the output of pgrep ^java$ to the variable $p and runs renice -n 5 -p $p at each iteration until the output of pgrep ^java$ is consumed