Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 09:44:08 -0500 From: Nathan Vidican <webmaster@wmptl.com> To: Richard B Mahoney <rbm49@it.canterbury.ac.nz> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Restricting a users CPU usage -- Possible? Message-ID: <3A1D2D38.FE2FEE12@wmptl.com> References: <20001123144644.B42752@student.canterbury.ac.nz>
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"Richard B. Mahoney" wrote: > > Dear Readers, > > I know its possible to restrict user disk storage quotas under FreeBSD > but what about a user's CPU usage? I've searched for info on this and > have come up empty handed. The reason I ask is as follows. > > This is the system: > > FreeBSD student.canterbury.ac.nz 4.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE #0: > Thu Jul 20 13:20:28 NZST 2000 > root@172.31.45.238:/usr/src/sys/compile/MUGGINS i386 > > It's an elderly Digital Venturis 5133 with 40Meg RAM. > > This is the problem: > > I spend most of my time in Emacs writing papers with AucTeX and > teTeX. They have lots of footnotes & I am always reformating > paragraphs and so on. > > On occaision, if the formating is particularly tricky, Emacs starts > chewing up memory. It can blow out from its usual 8Meg or so to over > 30Meg. The trouble is that once it reaches these levels it just stays > there and never returns to its original level. The only way to peg it > back is to kill it and startup all over again. The other problem is > that when its formating it almost completely takes over the processor > and other programmes become unresponsive. > > The other day Emacs kept climbing in this way and exceeded the > available swap space. The system promptly stepped in and killed it by > itself! I was in many ways delighted. Under any other system and a > reboot would have been needed. > > Nonetheless, what I would like to do is to restrict the amount of CPU > that emacs has access to. In this way, if it decides to become a rogue > programme I can simply Ctl-Alt-F2 out of Blackbox, then log in as > root, and have sufficient CPU available to quickly put a stop to it. > > Any assistance would be appreciated. > > Regards, > > Richard Mahoney > > > -- > ====================================================================== > Richard Mahoney /^^^\ Telephone: +64-3-351-5831 > 78 Jeffreys Rd (| , , |) > Christchurch | * | > NEW ZEALAND \_-_/ mailto:rbm49@csc.canterbury.ac.nz > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message try using 'nice' for the CPU usage, but seems you have a ram issue here. -- Nathan Vidican webmaster@wmptl.com Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd. http://www.wmptl.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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