Ever copied or moved tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data? If you did, you surely noticed that the system becomes much less responsive during that time. On Linux you can avoid this with the help of the ionice command. What Is I/O Priority? I/O is short for input/output. There are many types of I/O devices, but in this case it’s about storage devices. Each process that wants to read or write data to such a device is assigned a scheduling class and priority number (or “nice” value). This applies on Linux to filesystems such as ext4. Other filesystems, such as ZFS, may implement slightly… Read more