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