4 ms·

I'm curious, how do you limit memory or CPU resources in a regular linux system for a process?

• aaomidi 5y ago
  Cgroups For example, systemd integrates with cgroups and you can limit resource use for services started with it
• xorcist 5y ago
  man ulimit Not sure what constitutes a regular Linux system but apart from the shell command the underlying ulimit syscall getrlimit(2) is in the kernel itself. One can set hard and soft limits on a per process granularity. Normally each service has a dedicated uid and limits as well as nice levels are set in /etc/security/limits.conf which is read on login sessions by pam_limits. This is in every bsd- and posix-like system and some of the soft limits have standardised signals assigned to them. The man page has all the details and is easy enough to understand.
  • cranekam 5y ago
    ulimit on Linux doesn’t support limiting RSS, only VSZ. I’d argue that limiting RSS — i.e., how much of the process in main memory — is more aligned with what someone wants than how big its virtual address space is, which can easily be distorted by e.g. mmap()ing a huge file in. IME trying to restrict by VSZ just leads to surprises when malloc() fails at surprising times. cgroups are a much better way to go.