[PaulDavisThe1st]

> There are a few processes in the bot that are especially latency sensitive, which we have tuned the nice value for.

This immediately signifies some level of "does not understand how this stuff works". Latency sensitive (audio or other) tasks need to be in the SCHED_RR or SCHED_FIFO scheduling class, which nice(1) has no effect on.

Conversely, using nice(1) on a SCHED_OTHER task is also unlikely to work, given that nice only impacts scheduling decisions and cannot provide RT-like behavior.

[rcxdude]

I think in this case, unless they were running an RT kernel, it wouldn't have helped, since the interrupt hogging the CPU was non-preemptable. But it's good advice in general.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

RT is in the mainline kernel now. Run with threaded_irqs, all interrupt handlers become preemptable (by default).

[rcxdude]

True, but that's very recent, and still not a default configuration. (And the message reported in the article was removed from the mainline kernel in 2018)