How to limit ram usage of a certain binary?

Question

i have a binary, which indexes some stuff, it eats all my ram and my swap. Then the server hangs.

I would like to limit its ram usage.

I've looking at cpulimit and /etc/security/limits.conf but both of them focus on cpu limits and user/processes .

Have somebody limited the usage of a certain binary? How can I approach this issue?

Thanks

Answer 1

Use ulimit. In particular ulimit -m.

Answer 2

limits.conf has several entries to limit memory usage you may consider, i.e. data, rss, stack.