Nice levels

[Chip Seraphine]

I'm encountering  a situation where the times at which I most need to run 
cfengine on my production servers are the times when they can least afford to 
give up CPU.  This can be mitigated by using classes to skip not-so-important 
checks during our 'peak' hours, but I would also like to run the cfagent at a 
lower priority.

Currently, I have cfrun initiating all the cfagent runs on the hosts.  I could 
presumably nice down cfservd, but I would imagine that this would cause *all* 
my cfagent runs to occur at lower priority, which is not what I want.  (For 
example, I might want to have cfrun tell all the hosts to kill cpu-eating 
zombies; if the cfagent is runnign at "nice -19" on a pegged machine, this 
will not work well.)

How has everybody else handled this?  What is a good way of raising the nice 
level of a cfagent process that is initiated via cfrun?

Note:  I am not interested in the actual *merits* of nice-ing the process.  I 
have a political requirement to adjust the priority, not merely reduce the 
actual cpu consumption or demonstrate that it is "not really a problem".