Linux: prioritize I/O

I've noticed despite being launched with the lowest priority, processes which are very I/O demanding can hog my system badly. I/O requests to the hard drive produced by a lowest priority tar xzvf, rpm update, etc. can make high priority applications launch terribly slow. What's even more bugging, Windows behaves much better at these siuations, so when the system is loaded with compression or similar tasks, it looks slower when running Linux.

Is there any way to prioritize I/O on Linux? Ideally, the priority of the process originating I/O should count for I/O scheduling.

man nice

>>2
man nice
QFT

>>2-3, you morons, at least read my fucking message. I said I was using nice already, and I was asking for I/O scheduling, not process scheduling. man operating system.

google is your friend:
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0111.2/0196.html

>>4
Nice is for IO scheduling.

recompile your kernel and use a different i/o scheduler

>>6
As far as I could see in the man page, it's for process scheduling.

OP did you follow the link i poasted in >>5???

man page fer ya:

                                                        ELVTUNE(8)

NAME

       elvtune - I/O elevator tuner

SYNOPSIS

       elvtune  [  -r  r_lat  ]  [  -w  w_lat  ]  [  -b b_max ] /dev/blkdev1 [
       /dev/blkdev2 ...  ]

       elvtune -h

       elvtune -v


DESCRIPTION

       elvtune allows to tune the I/O elevator per  blockdevice  queue  basis.
       The  tuning  can  be  safely done at runtime. Tuning the elevator means
       being able to change disk performance and interactiveness. In the  out-
       put  of elvtune the address of the queue tuned will be shown and it can
       be considered as a queue ID.  For example multiple  partitions  in  the
       same  harddisk  will  share  the same queue and so tuning one partition
       will be like tuning the whole HD.

I'm in ur block device, tuning my elevator

>>10

100% pure win, please show picture ID at the booth to collect your Internets