No! Don’t do that.
First of all, if you are running another program that consumes 100% CPU every 5 minutes, then you are likely introducing jitter/audio gaps into your open audio channels. This is not acceptable for any commercial PBX installation.
Next, although increasing the process priority of HAAst will allow it to better survive these CPU spikes, HAAst will still detect that Asterisk is unresponsive, Linux/driver services are unresponsive, etc. And HAAst will still (correctly) initiate a failover.
You need to fix the root of your problem: the graphing software. If this is started by cron, then I suggest you create a script that is launched by cron. In that script call your graphing software with nice/ionice values that makes it behave better. It’s never ok to have a program consume 100% CPU on your PBX!
