How to stop someone eating all the memory?

kshazad86 · 04-17-2011, 12:21 PM

If I have a centos linux server, how can I stop a user on the server from eating all the memory and swap space memory, maybe due to a poorly written script, infinite loop etc?

ButterflyMelissa · 04-17-2011, 01:26 PM

I'd enforce file system quota's...

maybe this will help:
http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/Lin...ialQuotas.html

Luck!

Thor

smallpond · 04-17-2011, 01:29 PM

/etc/security/limits give you some controls over user processes.

You can set a per-process max VM size, which should do what you want.

See the man page for setrlimit for a description of what the various limits control.

anomie · 04-17-2011, 01:33 PM

I will second the pam_limits recommendation (although you're going to want to do some reading to supplement setrlimit(2)). Please see the manpages for pam_limits(8) and limits.conf(5).

kshazad86 · 04-17-2011, 02:29 PM

Thanks for replying...

I have noticed I can set the memory limit per process in /etc/profile

Quote:

ulimit -n 4096 -u 14335 -m unlimited -d unlimited -s 8192 -c 1000000 -v unlimited 2>/dev/null

I have two questions:

1.) Will changes to this file affect every user on the server?
2.) What would be a good limit to place on "max memory size" and "virtual memory" and should they be the same?

Note: My system currently has 8GB of RAM.