On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Jason Grout <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've been doing some experiments with the python resource module and the
> setrlimit command to set resource limits on processes.  I've found something
> very interesting: it seems that on OSX (10.6.8), there is no way to have a
> hard cap on the amount of memory a process uses, at least no way that I can
> find.

Wow, this is really disturbing.  Thanks for letting us know about this.
I tried using "ulimit -v" from bash in OS X, and it also doesn't seem
to do anything at all.
Scary.


> The RLIMIT_AS category for resource limits on OSX is an alias for
> RLIMIT_RSS (see /usr/include/system/resources.h, and note that RLIMIT_AS
> does not appear in the setrlimit manpage).  However, on Linux (at least the
> linux running on boxen), RLIMIT_AS *does* seem to put a hard cap on the
> amount of memory a process can use, and the process fails if it tries to use
> more memory than that.
>
> So, the takeaway: be careful when running public sage notebook servers on
> OSX, since you can't specify a maximum memory hard cap for a process.
>
> On the other hand, maybe I'm misunderstanding something.  Does anyone know
> how to set a hard memory cap on OSX?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jason
>
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-- 
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

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