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Is there any way to set the priority of a process in Mac OS X?

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 2026107615 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

I have a background process running at 100% CPU on Mac OS X. All other applications are very slow because of it. I'd like to set this process to take no more than 50% so that my applications can run better. How can I do this?

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Fix for: Is there any way to set the priority of a process in Mac OS X?

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From the command line ( or whatever) use and , just like on other unixes. Use when launching a process: The default priority is zero, positive values are "nicer" (that is lower priority) and negative values are "less nice" (higher priority). Looks like Mac OS runs from +10 to -10. Use to change the priority of a process already running (from the man page on 10.5): The part you're interested in here is the bit. That is the process id for the job and you can find it using and looking for the proc…

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