[Gllug] ulimits

[Rob]

Hi Jon,
This isn't a direct answer but more a thought;

I've never seen what you're describing below, I use a cluster
implementation (at work so it isn't free). To run 'workhorse' machines,
the filing is then dealt with thru NFS with a huge (multi-Tb) network
file server in the background.
We did experiment with including the Fileserver in the cluster
environment but it plays merry hell with NFS. 
All I can suggest is to move the processing activities (whatever jobs
are running) to a seperate machine which uses a fair share system
(admittedly this works better with multiple machines) - this tends to
balance the read/writes sufficiently that you don't have much slow down.
The software used requires that you launch jobs thru its interface (CLI
or GUI)it then monitors the load on each process per user and attempts
to manage the load by suspending jobs that have overrun their allocation
based on what is currently in the queue.
The provider is www.platform.com
Not sure if the linux clustering solutions can do this - but this
solution works with various *NIX's and even NT (although I'd advise this
should be in a seperate cluster)

Sorry it's not a full answer,
Cheers
Rob
 



Jon Masters wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have some fairly standard ulimits imposed via the PAM limits.conf file
> on a largish fileserver/workhorse box which work fine except I want to
> do something which is not listed in the manuals/other docs AFAICS.
> 
> I know you can restrict CPU /time/ and set /priority/ limits but I want
> to be able to say "for user blah do not let them have more than 50% of
> CPU at any one moment in time" - I know it's not nice...but I want to.
> 
> I have thought about monitoring scripts which keep an eye on users and
> which run at a higher priority than the user's processes (coupled with
> setting each user to lower priority levels than that of core stuff which
> must be kept running on that box all the time) but these are all kludges
> - what I want is something I do not seem to be able to find. Any ideas?
> 
> I don't need a lesson in user limits, just an answer to this question :)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --jcm
> 
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