Hello there,

first of all, excuse my poor and bad English, plz ;-)

How , i can limit the processor usage and memory usage of a particular process.
An example, i want to import a back up dump file of MySQL DB, so the sql file is abt 30 MB big, not such a big deal but when i try to import it with mysql -u root -p -h localhost -D DBname < backupfile.sql , this process just takes all the cpu time and memory maybe i am not sure. So my PC which has 512 ram and 2,8 Ghz cpu, just freezes for more than 2 hours... The fan is going mental the HDD activity light is permanently on during that time. The PC is just unusable for 2 h's , ti just can't afford that to happen on my hosting sever, where i am ment to import this back up sql file.

I did read abt "ulimit" command but it seems to limit just the number ot processes not their priority, i have seen "man nice" as well but the problem is how would i know the ID of a fiture process so I can put it in a nice command, or how can start these mysql and nice processes at simultaneously so nice to be able to limit the greedy "mysql " import process?

I hope i made my self clear ;-) , so please could you give me any clues or solution ??

Regards
George

30MB or do you mean 30GB? Cause if it takes 2 hours to dump a 30MB file, I'd seriously start considering you have hardware problems..

Regardless of whether it's 30 MB or 30 GB, is it possible to limit the memory and cpu usage or a process? I remember reading somewhere that there was a kernel patch that could give you this functionality but was wondering if there's a workaround to this problem without recompiling the kernel. Thanks for your time.

try doing

nice -n 19 <yourCommand>