limiting simultaneous batch streams on Linux server

Ed Bascom · 03-27-2012, 12:57 PM

Linux does not provide a way to constrain the number of concurrent batch processes (jobs submitted via "at"). I need to limit these processes because our interactive booking environment is being impacted when too many jobs are running simultaneously in batch.
Is there and add-on solution someone can recommend to do this on RHEL 5.6?

MensaWater · 03-27-2012, 02:19 PM

Actually if you use "batch" rather than "at" it will limit jobs to run only to the level of CPU load (.8 by default) specified by atd.

You can change the level with atd -l.

Type "man at" and "man atd" for more details.

Ed Bascom · 03-27-2012, 03:19 PM

Thanks, but CPU load is not my issue - it is file contention when too many batch processes are run at the same time.
I need to limit the number of batch streams that are open.

chrism01 · 03-27-2012, 08:34 PM

Maybe this http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric/soft/ts/

Quote:

Control how many jobs may run at once in any queue (taking profit of multicores).

MensaWater · 03-28-2012, 07:07 AM

Are the at jobs being run all using the same script/binary? If it is a script you could modify the script itself to defer its run if it sees so many other copies already running. If it is a binary you could write a wrapper script to do that. It sounds to me as if your issue is not the number of at jobs per se but rather the number of copies of the same program running kicked off by at.