Limit memory usage for a single Linux process

penguin_pam

I'm running pdftoppm to convert a user-provided PDF into a 300DPI image. This works great, except if the user provides an PDF with a very large page size. pdftoppm will allocate enough memory to hold a 300DPI image of that size in memory, which for a 100 inch square page is 100300 * 100300 * 4 bytes per pixel = 3.5GB. A malicious user could just...

Originally asked by Ben Dilts on Stack Exchange (unix) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Good Linux question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Another way to limit this is to use Linux's control groups. This is especially useful if you want to limit a process's (or group of processes') allocation of physical memory distinctly from virtual memory. For example: cgcreate -g memory:myGroup echo 500M > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/myGroup/memory.limit_in_bytes echo 5G > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/myGroup/memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes will create a control group named myGroup , cap the set of processes run under myGroup up to 500 MB of physical memory with memory.limit_in_bytes and up to 5000 MB of physical and swap memory together with...

Full answer by user65369: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/125024 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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