Limiting Processes

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Apr 28), Shane Hale said:
> I'm trying to limit the amount of time a process will run in
> userland. Some of the users on my the network decide to keep BitchX
> and IRC processes running for eons and I'm wondering if there is a
> way to stop this.

You can set per-process cpu limits in /etc/login.conf (the cputime
capability).  Although you may be misreading the CPU column.  It's in
minutes:seconds.fractions, so for example
 
> beastah 29501  0.0  1.2  3324 1460  p3  Ss+  11Apr03   2:37.11 BitchX -n BeAsTaH irc.gamesnet.net (BitchX-1.0c19)

This user started a session on the 11th, and it has consumed 2 minutes
of CPU time.  Not all that much for 17 days of real time.  If you have
a CPU load issue it's probably someplace else.

If you just want to kill long-running processes on principle, the idled
utility in ports/sysutils/idled might have a way to do that.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com