On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 09:09:40AM +0100, Joerg Jaspert wrote: > On 11217 March 1977, Peter Pentchev wrote: > > > * Package name : timelimit > > Version : 1.0 > > Upstream Author : Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net> > > * URL : http://devel.ringlet.net/sysutils/timelimit/ > > * License : Two-clause BSD > > Programming Lang: C > > Description : Simple utility to limit a process's absolute execution time > > Whats the added plus compared to package timeout? Well, from a quick look at timeout, it seems that there are two basic differences between it and timelimit: - timelimit sends a warning signal first, and a kill signal later, so processes have a chance to shut down gracefully, and uncooperative processes are killed anyway; - timeout has process group handling which takes care of child processes spawned by the executed command. The latter may be a useful addition to timelimit, albeit in a slightly different form due to the warning signal policy - we don't want the timelimit process itself to die because of the warning signal it sent to itself, too :) The former, though - the warning signal policy itself - I personally regard as highly useful, especially when dealing with untrusted user processes in a shared hosting environment. Actually, the reason I resurrected timelimit this year (I originally wrote it in 2001, used it for a while, and then just let it lie) was to deal with a bothersome web hosting customer's badly-written CGI apps, which repeatedly brought a four-CPU system to its knees. A wallclock time limitation was the cure, and sending a warning signal before that insured a graceful termination of the app, closing files, leaving databases in a consistent state, etc. Of course, if there is a strong consensus that this is not enough to merit a separate utility, I will withdraw the ITP - although the package is already made and in production use in our environment. G'luck, Peter -- Peter Pentchev roam@ringlet.net roam@cnsys.bg roam@FreeBSD.org PGP key: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc Key fingerprint FDBA FD79 C26F 3C51 C95E DF9E ED18 B68D 1619 4553 This sentence no verb.
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