Re: Limiting Memory Use Per Process/User

[Stephen Le <zeroion@gmail.com>]

On 5/4/05, nodata <debian@nodata.co.uk> wrote:
> > I was wondering if there was a way to limit the amount of memory used
> > by any single process or user. I'd like to prevent Apache (and other
> > server daemons) from consuming all available memory and thrashing my
> > disk when everything else is forced to swap.
> >
> > For example, I'm currently testing the coppermine image gallery
> > software. It's written in PHP and uses ImageMagick. Whenever images
> > are uploaded to the gallery, it spawns a number of fairly large
> > /usb/bin/convert processes under the 'www-data' user name. These
> > processes consume all available memory and result in disk thrashing
> > that brings my server down to a grinding halt. Is there a way to
> > prevent this from happening?
> >
> ulimit -a, but that's probably not a good solution for this.

ulimit only applies to commands started by the shell. If Apache (or
any other daemon) spawns a child process, would ulimit apply to them?

I would really like to set a 'max memory usage per user' or 'max
memory usage per process' setting.

--Stephen Le