Re: ulimit for groups

On Apr 10, 1:16 pm, "Doug Freyburger" <dfrey...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
adam.carhe...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I need a way to limit the maximum memory used by a group of people
(i.e. ulimit for groups).

"When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail".

I have a server with 32G of memory but very little swap space. I have
users running processes that take up large amounts of memory (30+ G).
If I get a few large jobs running, the system becomes unresponsive,

To me this sounds like you need to wrap that program in a script
that submits to a batch queue so only one runs at a time. No
an issue of ulimit but an issue of preventing multiple runs. Or
wrap the whole set of programs to submit to batch queues.

Even better, good batch queuing software might be able to farm
the runs out to other boxes should any come available.

Also, user training isn't an option as users just don't listen.

That's where the wrapper script comes in. Replace their program
with a wrapper that does the submission to the queue.

Unfortunately it's not just one program. Various people run various
things. The current big one is Matlab, and I can't wrap the matlab bin
in a script because many people use it for may different things. With
my mpi users, I just use torque as a queueing system, but for those
nasty users who need to run non-parallel programs from the gui, I'm
stuck. Anyone else have any ideas? I can't be the first person in the
history of Unix to have this problem.

.

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