Debian – How to prevent cron jobs from being run during certain times in Debian? (a ‘gaming’ / ‘performance mode’)

cpucrondebianlaptopperformance

It looks like I have logcheck set up as a cron job and whenever it's run process grep by logcheck takes up around ¼ of my CPU.

Now I have certain times during which I need my full CPU capacity and have my system take up fewest resources as possible except for specific/processes (which I maybe could specify somehow).

Is it possible to set my Debian 9.1 with KDE machine into some sort of performance mode (or 'Gaming mode') that prevents processes not explicitly started by the user from taking up much system resources, lowers the load of background-processes and most importantly: delays cron jobs until that mode is stopped again?

Best Answer

If “certain times” aren’t fixed, i.e. you want to specify manually when your system enters and leaves “performance mode”, you can simply stop and start cron:

sudo systemctl stop cron

will prevent any cron jobs from running, and

sudo systemctl start cron

will re-enable them.

You could also check out anacron instead of cron, it might be easier to tweak globally in a way which would fit your uses.

Related Solutions

How to run a command as if it is called from cron

Here is how to do the other way around: forcing cron execution to use your login environment:

bash -lc "your_command"

From the bash manual:

-c string     If the -c option is present, then commands are read from string.
              If there are arguments after the string, they are assigned to the
               positional parameters, starting with $0.
-l            Make bash act as if it had been invoked as a login shell
               (see INVOCATION below).

INVOCATION (a bit stripped):

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.

To known more:

man bash

Debian Boot – How to Activate Extra-Verbose Mode for Debugging

Here is a list of all possible boot parameters: I've never used it, but try adding ignore_loglevel.

I previously mentioned verbose, but actually that only applies to other specific kernel options like acpi, as you can read, above.

With an understanding of your exact hardware, like it seems you have, you can go even deeper with this article on kernel hacking

This file is supposed to be included in /linux/documentationn according to an article on The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP.org)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to run a command as if it is called from cron

Debian Boot – How to Activate Extra-Verbose Mode for Debugging

Related Question