How do I throttle back Perl or the CPU?

[pubwvj]

My Mac is having some overheating issues. It is old but I'm not replacing it yet so I have to make do. This is a PowerBook G4 Aluminum 15.2" 1.67GHz running MacOSX10.4.11 Tiger. I have it up on an external fan to chill it. That helps a lot. If I keep the processor activity under about 60% then it is fine. Above that even with the fan on it quickly hits 163°F on the Processor Bottomside and crashes.

The question of the day is how can I throttle back the machine? Is there a utility out there that will let me set a maximum CPU usage? I want my machine to run slower... Rather unusual request there I realize.

Specifically there is a Perl script for Deja Vu which is a backup utility which runs the machine too hot every time. So if there isn't a way to achieve overall throttling of the machine how about throttling Perl?

Any ideas are greatly appreciated. If you want to suggest I buy a new machine then please send a donation with the suggestion. I'm working with in the realities of my budget.

 

[lewis82]

There must be a way to set a lower priority on the process, but I guess even by doing this, it would run at 100%, as long as other processes don't need more.

 

[angelwatt]

You potentially could make use of the nice command to give the process a lower priority. I don't know how helpful it'll be in this instance, but was the first thing that came to mind.

 

[costabunny]

use 'ps aux | grep perl' to get the PID
then 'renice 19 <PID>' to reduce its priority

(as root or with sudo)