[HTCondor-users] Using cgroups to limit job memory

[Roderick Johnstone <rmj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi

I'm using HTCondor 8.2.7 on Redhat 6.6 and have set up cgroups as per 
the manual so that jobs with many processes cannot take too much memory. 
I have CGROUP_MEMORY_LIMIT_POLICY = hard

When I specify eg request_memory=100M in the job submit file the job is 
indeed limited to 100M of resident memory.

While this behaviour is good for the machine owner, its less than ideal 
for the job owner since the job may continue but only very slowly since 
its paging a lot. This condition might not be obvious to the job owner.

Although this seems to be the behaviour documented in the manual, I'm 
sure I have seen a description of a configuration in which the job can 
be placed on hold with a suitable message if it tries to allocate more 
memory than it requests, although I can't find that now.

So, is it possible to configure what happens when the job exceeds the 
requested memory at all?

Thanks

Roderick Johnstone