polynice

polynice is a simple command line utility to throttle long running processes beyond what can be achieved by nice(1). This is done by periodically suspending and resuming the process and its child proceses.

It can also lower scheduler and I/O priorities, emulating nice(1) and ionice(1), and terminate the processes after given time.

To learn more, read the README file coming with it.

The official repository is on github. You can download the tarball and Debian package from here. The software is licensed under GPLv2.