I'm running a small Debian compute cluster on 8-core PCs with 16GB of RAM. I'm running batches of about 1k tasks (each batch has a total expected time of a month to be finished). A single task is single-threaded (so I can run multiple of them in parallel on each PC), does not consume much IO (loads several megabytes of data on start and dumps several megabytes of data on exit; does not communicate with outside world otherwise), its run time is unknown (from few minutes to ~week), its memory consumption is unknown (ranging from several megabytes to ~8GB; usage may grow slowly or quickly). I'd like to as many such tasks as possible in parallel on a single PC, but I want to avoid excessive swapping.
So I got an idea: I could monitor the memory usage of these tasks and suspend (kill -SIGSTOP
) or hibernate (using a tool like CryoPID) tasks which consume too much memory to restart them later. By memory usage I mean number of “active virtual pages”, or number of allocated, not shared memory pages that have actually been touched (these tasks may allocate memory without using them).
I started looking for some tools to do that. I know that I can ulimit
or run a task inside a memory-limited cgroup, but—if I understand them correctly—these solutions will kill the process instead of suspending it. I want to avoid killing them, because I would need to start them from scratch later, and that means wasted time. Also, they cannot actually measure the number of active virtual pages.
I could use real virtual machines, but they seem to have significant overhead in this case—having separate kernel, memory allocations, etc. would decrease the available memory; I'd have to run 8 of them. Also, as far as I know, they'd add computational overhead too.
I imagine that a tool that would implement such behavior would hook up some function to a page fault notification that would decide on each page fault whether it is time to suspend the process or not. But I don't know any tool that would work this way either.
Are there other choices?