[CentOS] /etc/security/limits.conf : rss

Devin Reade gdr at gno.org
Mon Jun 6 16:02:27 UTC 2011


--On Friday, June 03, 2011 07:10:44 PM +0200 Christophe Caron
<christophe.caron at sb-roscoff.fr> wrote:

> I want to limit the memory usage about 150 GB per process.
> So i use the /etc/security/limits.conf configuration file. I test this
> configuration with some tools with a lower GB limit (about 2 or 4 GB),
> and it works !
> 
> But, at least one process (oases - a bioinformatics tool) bypass this
> limitation and use always 240 GB of memory (the last run) !!

A few of things come to mind:

1.  Is your bioinformatics tool running as a privileged process
    (perhaps because it is being started as a daemon and is not
    dropping privs?)  I don't think the hard limit applies in this
    case.  If this is happening, you may want to take a big stick
    to your application programmers :)

2.  /etc/security/limits.conf is used by pam_limits.  Have you 
    verified that that module is configured and required by pam?

3.  How is the bioinformatics tool being started, and did you start
    your other test tools (where you checked with a lower GB limit)
    the same way.  I don't know one way or the other whether pam
    restrictions apply to programs started as daemons.
   
4.  Are you able to have the bioinformatics tool log its hard and
    soft limits, and real & effective uid/gids upon startup?
    (If you can't, then maybe write a C wrapper for it that will
    do this.)  That may be the quickest way to tell you what
    your OS config is actually doing.

Devin




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