Skip to main content

apache 2.2 - How Would I Restrict a Linux Binary to a Limited Amount of RAM?

I would like to be able to limit an installed binary to only be able to use up to a certain amount of RAM. I don't want it to get killed if it exceeds it, only that that would be the max amount that it could use. I would like the process to die once it reaches a certain amount of RAM, preferably before the server starts to swap heavily.



The problem I am facing is that I am running an Apache 2.2 server with PHP and some custom code that a developer is writing for us. The problem is that somewhere in there code they launch a PHP exec call that launches ImageMagick's 'convert' to create a resized image file.



I'm not privy to a lot of details to the project or the code, but need to find a solution to keep them from killing the server until they can find a way to optimize the code.



I had thought that I could do this with /etc/security/limits.conf and setting a limit on the apache user, but it seems to have no effect. This is what I used:



www-data hard as 500




If I understand it correctly, this should have limited any apache user process to a maximum to 500kb, however, when I ran a test script that would chew up a lot of RAM, this actually got up to 1.5GB before I killed it. Here is the output of 'ps auxf' after the setting change and a system reboot:




USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      5268  0.0  0.0 401072 10264 ?        Ss   15:28   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data  5274  0.0  0.0 402468  9484 ?        S    15:28   0:00  \_ /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data  5285  102  9.4 1633500 1503452 ?     Rl   15:29   0:58  |   \_ /usr/bin/convert ../tours/28786/.….
www-data  5275  0.0  0.0 401072  5812 ?        S    15:28   0:00  \_ /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start



Next I thought I could do it with Apache's RlimitMEM setting, but get the same result of it not getting limited. Here is what I have in my apache.conf file:



RLimitMEM 500000 512000



It wasn't until many hours later that I figured out that if the process actually reached that amount that it would die with an OOM error.



Would love any ideas on how to set this limit so other things could function on the server, and all of them could play together nicely.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

linux - iDRAC6 Virtual Media native library cannot be loaded

When attempting to mount Virtual Media on a iDRAC6 IP KVM session I get the following error: I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 and: $ javaws -version Java(TM) Web Start 1.6.0_16 $ uname -a Linux aud22419-linux 2.6.28-15-generic #51-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 31 13:39:06 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ firefox -version Mozilla Firefox 3.0.14, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2009 mozilla.org On Windows + IE it (unsurprisingly) works. I've just gotten off the phone with the Dell tech support and I was told it is known to work on Linux + Firefox, albeit Ubuntu is not supported (by Dell, that is). Has anyone out there managed to mount virtual media in the same scenario?
Post a Comment
Read more

ubuntu - Monitoring CPU, Mem, disk, on a single server

I've been looking for a simple starter solution for monitoring my [currently] single server hosted solution. Other than Nagios and similar, are there other good (simple) solutions people are using? Answer Everything depends on what you want. For example Munin is very simple, you can install and configure it in less then 10 minutes (on one server), it can sends alarms, make graphs from monitoring cpu, mem. apache connections, eaccellerator, disk io and many many more (it has many plugins). But if you are planning in future get some more machines, munin may not be enough. For example in munin you cant monitor state of individual processes, can't monitor changes in files (for security purpose). So if you wanna only see what is the utilization of basics parameters on your server and don't plan to buy some more servers Munin is what you are looking for, but if you wanna be alarmed when some of your service is down, take more control on what is happeninig on...
Post a Comment
Read more

hp proliant - Smart Array P822 with HBA Mode?

We get an HP DL360 G8 with an Smart Array P822 controller. On that controller will come a HP StorageWorks D2700 . Does anybody know, that it is possible to run the Smart Array P822 in HBA mode? I found only information about the P410i, who can run HBA. If this is not supported, what you think about the LSI 9207-8e controller? Will this fit good in that setup? The Hardware we get is used but all original from HP. The StorageWorks has 25 x 900 GB SAS 10K disks. Because the disks are not new I would like to use only 22 for raid6, and the rest for spare (I need to see if the disk count is optimal or not for zfs). It would be nice if I'm not stick to SAS in future. As OS I would like to install debian stretch with zfs 0.71 as file system and software raid. I have see that hp has an page for debian to. I would like to use hba mode because it is recommend, that zfs know at most as possible about the disk, and I'm independent from the raid controller. For us zfs have many benefits, ...
Post a Comment
Read more