On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 12:02:39AM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote: > What I imagine, and surely hope is that this softlimit program works as > advertised.
It's hardly unique. You could do the same thing with a shell script wrapper that calls ulimit and then exec's the target program. > [stuff about buffers] > Since if it's not written in a totally insane way, cp (and to a lesser > extent rsync) should work like this already, what we really need to > limit is that pig with the strange "Linux" name rsync uses a shitload of memory not because it's copying a file with an enormous buffer size, but because it's tracking *all* of the file metadata in the entire hierarchy that you feed to it. > What has been happening since the dawn of time is that this kernel > caches _every_ disk page read by a program such as cp [...] Well, prematurely killing rsync is not going to affect the kernel's retention or discarding of specific disk cache pages that are more precious to you.