Hi, anacron runs cron.daily, cron.weekly and cron.monthly niced, so it
yields the cpu to normal processes when they try to run simultaneously. With
recent kernels there is a command to do the same with the io devices:
ionice. This command is part of util-linux, which is an essential package in
Debian. Some packages (like locate) include cron scripts that ionice
themselves before running, but I think it should be better to ionice every
cron.* from anacron itself, instead of doing it on a per-script basis. The
patch attached makes all anacron jobs ionice, so the system is more
responsible while running cron jobs. As I/O becomes the bottleneck in some
systems, I think ionicing cron jobs improves user experience.

Regards,
Javi

There are a number of complications involved in using ionice in this
context.  If you look at what some of the existing cron jobs that use
this are doing, that's quite a complicated business that I'd rather not
get involved in.  It would be nice if this could all be wrapped into
some script ionice-if-usable for use by cron jobs and such.  But until
then, I don't see much benefit into adding this maintenance overhead,
especially since the relevant cron jobs are already making use of ionice
themselves anyway.