How do I activate limits.conf
 

Ok, forget the other questions...

I've set limits in limits.conf but they don't seem to be having an effect (the easiest to test is maxlogins). Do I need to do something to enable the limits?

:wq

EDIT: old post

I know you can have file system quotas, is there any way to set a similar quota for CPU usage for particular users so that they can't hog all the system resources (either intentionally or accidentally)?

A preliminary Google search is suggesting it's not possible, but I can't believe that.

Ok, limits.conf and pam... I used bad search terms apparently. Now I just need to figure out how to use this stuff, but that shouldn't be an issue.

Ok, I can do what I need with pam, except CPU time. There doesn't seem to be a way to restrict a user to a max amount of CPU time as a percentage of the current second. Only a max number of time (in minutes) per sessions. That's relatively useless (I could set it to a high number and if a user brings the system down, then eventually it will get caught and stop using resources... but it has to be high enough not to interfere with normal use).

Does anyone have suggested settings for any of:

stack
cpu
priority
sigpending
nice
rtprio

Ok, I set some things but it's not actually having an effect.

Maybe I need to reboot? Usually you can just restart a process at worst...