[ltp] Renice disk ?

[Richard]

Dear All,

Is there any way to "renice" disk access?

For example, when I boot my TP (or bring it out of suspend), anacron 
causes it to run programs such as updatedb and msec. These programs run at 
nice level 20, taking the lowest level priority on the CPU. However, 
because they require lots of disk access, they make other programs that 
need to use the disk very unresponsive (eg starting bash, running su, 
opening files).

Given that the system is disk-bound rather than CPU-bound, what should I 
do about this? Google appears to have no advice.

Regards

Richard


P.S. Yes, I know that I could either disable anacron, or kill the 
offending program. But I am hoping for a proper solution :-)