What is % Nice on the Activity Monitor?

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On the Activity Monitor program, under the CPU tab, there is a blue number labeled % Nice. Most of the time it is 0.00, but once in a while it is quite active. What is it suppose to represent? Is it bad?
 
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What OS are you running ?

Cheers ... McBie
 
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It's the priority of the task. -19 is the highest and 20 is the lowest (I think)

You can change the priority of a task from the terminal with the command "renice" using the PID

renice 1554 -19

That would make process 1554 a much higher priority

It's not usually necessary to mess around with the nice command, although occassionally it can be useful, for example making Logic Pro less prone to interruptions when recording.

Anyway, what you're seeing is the priority of each process in the activity monitor.
 

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