I use NetBSD at home as a NAT/Firewall/utility machine, running between my
home network and a cable modem.  These days I'm sure this is a fairly common
scenario.  Among the rather small duties of this machine is to act as a
dedicated gaming server, specifically quake3 (thanks to some help by the
fine readers of this mail group).  Games like quake3 may not be very
important in the grand scheme of things, and probably some people may not
think its worth the time of day to worry about it, but I think its a
perfectly valid application of NetBSD.  Its also a good test of performance
on the scale of a home machine (I think) since it is a program that uses a
fair amount of I/O and demands low latency.  Anyway....
It runs great, no problems, except every 5 minutes on the dot, there is a
big spike of lag in game for all connected clients.  Obviously, this is
related to perl starting from cron to run MRTG.  I would rather quake3 get
the cycles, so immediately I think about renicing quake3 to something
negative.  Reading a few things online, I get the impression that doing so
is bad, and should be avoided.  Why is this?  Should I find another way to
keep the game latency low, and if so, how?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
-d