How to Limit CPU and Memory Usage With Cgroups on Debian/Ubuntu

README.md

How to Limit CPU and Memory Usage With Cgroups on Debian/Ubuntu

Cgroups is a flexible Linux kernel feature to limit, police and account resources usage. A cgroup is a set of tasks for a subsystems, that is typically a resource controller.

A file system of type cgroup is mounted and all operations are run over it.

Installation

The installation can be done using any of libcgroup, cgmanager or systemd.

Usage

They can be used in multiple ways

• By accessing the cgroup filesystem directly.
• Using the cgm client (part of the cgmanager).
• Via cgcreate, cgexec and cgclassify (part of cgroup-tools).
• Via cgconfig.conf and cgrules.conf (also part of cgroup-tools).

We will use this last option, so install cgroup-tools with

sudo apt-get install cgroup-tools

Debian, by default, disables the memory controller, we can enable it adding the following in /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet cgroup_enable=memory swapaccount=1"

So, update Grub

sudo update-grub

Now the environment and tools are ready, we will define some "roles" in /etc/cgconfig.conf

group app/editor {
  cpu {
    cpu.shares = 500;
  }
  memory {
    memory.limit_in_bytes = 1000000000;
  }
}

group app/browser {
  cpu {
    cpu.shares = 300;
  }
  memory {
    memory.limit_in_bytes = 1000000000;
  }
}

group app/util {
  cpu {
    cpu.shares = 300;
  }
  memory {
    memory.limit_in_bytes = 500000000;
  }
}

The maximum value for cpu.shares is 1000, so 300 is setting as 30% the usage limit for an application with this "role". memory.limit_in_bytes is self descriptive.

We will associate these "roles" and the applications in /etc/cgrules.conf

*:emacs         cpu,memory      app/editor/
*:conkeror      cpu,memory      app/browser/
*:firefox       cpu,memory      app/browser/
*:slack         cpu,memory      app/util/
*:dropbox       cpu,memory      app/util/

Now we need apply the rules with the commands

cgconfigparser -l /etc/cgconfig.conf
cgrulesengd

Add them in /etc/rc.local for applying on reboot.

That’s it!

We can check if our new rules were applied using

cat /proc/`pidof dropbox`/cgroup | grep app

# 5:memory:/app/util
# 2:cpu,cpuacct:/app/util

And we can check the memory usage of a process with

smem -P dropbox

# PID User     Command                         Swap      USS      PSS      RSS
# 1955 fernando /home/fernando/.dropbox-dis        0   191800   192388   201124

References

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v1/cgroups.txt

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v1/memory.txt

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/cgroups

moby/moby#396 (comment)

Credits

http://www.fernandoalmeida.net/blog/how-to-limit-cpu-and-memory-usage-with-cgroups-on-debian-ubuntu/

https://github.com/jooyong-park/workspace/wiki/cgroups-on-debian-ubuntu

Thank you