The command to set the importance of a running process is called “nice”. The nice rating of a program determine how quicky and the priority in which running processes are handled by the CPU. If a process has a nice value of 19 it will essentially allow any other process to be handled by the CPU before itself. If a process has a nice value of -19 it will take control of the processor at any time. System processes mostly have a nice value of -5. Init and other processes are set at 0. User processeses are also given a 0. I set my virtual machine to the same as regular system processeses, -5. This is because the virtual machine is essential just as important as host system processeses and contain system processeses itself. For my MythTV server I set it at +10; I don’t want it getting in the way of my web server or the host system itself, in any way whatsoever. Even higher I set the Myth frontend to +19 and throw it on another viewport. I use the Myth frontend to schedule recording, not necessarily to watch videos; thats what my Mac mini is for connected to my HD TV :) If you want to change the nice value of a process use renice. An example of this is: sudo renice -n 19 -p 16151 for -p you must put in the PID of the running process. You can use “ps” to determine the PID of a process. For example use: ps aux | grep mythfrontend.real You can also use “top”. Which gives you an updating realtime list of running processes.