Throttling Process Resource Consumption

humbletech99 · 03-02-2009, 04:19 AM

Is there a way of throttling a process resources, something akin to limits but for processes not users?

ie I want processX to be restricted in the amount of memory it can consume. For process cpu I guess I can simply nice the process, but total memory consumption is my primary concern.

unSpawn · 03-05-2009, 06:08 PM

Reasoning the other way around: Linux (kernel) does VMM pretty OK. And forcing an application to run in a suboptimal way is like creating artifical bottlenecks. Why would you want to disrupt it and sacrifice speed, efficiency and such? Can you be more specific about the application in question, how much memory it hogs and how much you've got? Forcing an application that relies on using a large chunk of memory for caching is unrealistic. Or is it by any chance Java based (which should accept -X and such)?

syg00 · 03-05-2009, 07:49 PM

Just the job for containers and cgroups (nee cpusets).
Go have a look in your kernel source tree for ../Documentation/cpusets.txt, ../Documentation/cgroups/*.txt and ../Documentation/controllers/*.txt
You get the idea. It took a while for this container paradigm to get accepted beyond the cluster folks, but it's now progressing in the general user population as well.

sundialsvcs · 03-06-2009, 10:35 AM

You might find it to be even simpler. The bash shell contains a ulimit command which can impose limits upon the programs that are subsequently run. You can set two kinds of limits: soft and hard. This lets you give the program "a shot across the bow" to let it know that it's about to hit the fence.

The softlimit command is also commonly used, e.g. by web hosting companies, to impose more stringent limits upon, say, CGI programs... or upon user shells.

Most Linuxes implement the quota system for billing and resource-metering purposes.