Arch Linux

baltic

Member

Registered: 2017-07-17

Posts: 17

chill - a disk IO bandwidth limiter

Run any command with a disk I/O bandwidth limit applied to every physical block device on the system.

chill 10M rsync -av /data/ /backup/

The command reads and writes to every real disk are capped at the given rate. The exit status of `chill` is the exit status of your command. Signals (Ctrl-C, `kill`, etc.) are forwarded to it, and if it dies from a signal, `chill` dies from the same one.

Useful for backups, downloads, builds, and anything else you don't want monopolizing the I/O.

Limitations

• Block devices only. Network filesystems (NFS, SMB, sshfs, etc.), FUSE, and ZFS are not throttled — they don't go through the block layer that the IO controller manages.

• Per-device, not aggregate. chill 10M with two active disks read means up to 20M/s total.

• Cached reads aren't throttled.

gh:  https://github.com/dsvi/chill
aur: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chill1

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 2,350

Re: chill - a disk IO bandwidth limiter

sorry - but wtf?
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chill
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chill1
this looks weird

baltic

Member

Registered: 2017-07-17

Posts: 17

Re: chill - a disk IO bandwidth limiter

there was an old `chill` package, last pushed in 2021 that was deleted from aur. But the repo is still there, even though invisible through web ui and impossible to reuse. Hence `chill1`

Oh i see it came to life now, probably coz of my adoption request

Last edited by baltic (Today 02:05:05)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 78,030

Re: chill - a disk IO bandwidth limiter

You maybe want to sell the benefits over https://man.archlinux.org/man/ionice.1
https://github.com/util-linux/util-linu … s/ionice.c

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baltic

Member

Registered: 2017-07-17

Posts: 17

Re: chill - a disk IO bandwidth limiter

I know about it, it doesn't cap anything, just sets priority.
And in the era of nvme it's not enough, since even with the lowest prio, those can saturate everything, including memory bandwidth. Making running even the lowest-priority thing in the background still very annoying.