RE: limit resident memory size

David Schwartz (davids@webmaster.com)
Thu, 12 Jun 2003 15:15:13 -0700


> I would like to limit the maximum resident memory size
> of a process within a threshold, i.e. if its virtual
> memory footprint exceeds this threshold, it needs to
> swap out pages *only* from within its VM space.

Why? If you think this is a good way to be nice to other processes, you're
wrong.

> First, is there a way this can be done at application
> level ? The setrlimit interface seems to contain an
> option for specifying max resident set size, but it
> doesnt seem like it is implemented as of 2.4 -- am I
> wrong ?

> If the kernel doesnt currently support it, is there an
> efficient way (data structure etc) to traverse the
> resident set of a *process* in lru fashion ? All the
> page replacement and swapping code work on the entire
> page lists -- is there any simple way to group these
> per process ?

One process paging and swapping excessively will hurt other processes that
aren't. What's your outer problem? What you're trying to do doesn't seem to
have any rational purpose.

DS

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