Can I Iimit the memory used by a Perl process in an OS-agnostic way?

Question

Is there an OS-agnostic Perl module that puts a hard limit on the amount of virtual memory a process can use; e.g. so that the process will be killed if it starts eating up too much memory?

I see Apache::SizeLimit, which is obviously Apache specific; and Process::MaxSize, which requires you to call a check function (and also has a hacky way of checking process size).

I've used ulimit in the past, but it requires you (AFAIK) to have an extra launching process, and it is OS-specific.

Thanks, Jon

Answer 1

I don't think perl can have any awareness of whether its memory usage is real or virtual. However if you remove real vs. virtual from your requirement, you could place a limit simply on the memory being used.

Devel::Size and Cache::SizeAwareMemoryCache might get you a bit closer, or BSD::Resource's setrlimit.