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1214

answers:

3

I need to limit the amount of time and cpu taken by external command line apps I spawn from a python process using subprocess.call , mainly because sometimes the spawned process gets stuck and pins the cpu at 99%.

nice and ulimit seem like reasonable ways to do this, but I'm not sure how they'd interact with subprocess.

  • The limits look something like:
    • Kill the process if it's taking more than 60 seconds
    • Limit it to 20% of cpu
  • I want to apply the resource limiting to the subprocess, not to the python process that's spawning the subprocesses.

Is there a way to apply nice and ulimit to the subprocess.call spawned process? Are there better python-native alternatives?

This is on a linux (ubuntu) system.

+4  A: 

You can set limits for subprocesses with the ulimit and nice shell commands like this:

import subprocess
subprocess.Popen('ulimit -t 60; nice -n 15 cpuhog', shell=True)

This runs cpuhog with a limit of 60 seconds of CPU time and a niceness adjustment of 15. Note that there is no simple way to set a 20% CPU throttle as such. The process will use 100% CPU unless another (less nice) process also needs the CPU.

Ville Laurikari
Thanks Ville, the cpu throttling you describe works great. Do you know if it's possible to do the same thing specifying the command with the bracket syntax instead of as a string?
Parand
As far as I can tell, you have to pass the entire shell command in one string for something like this to work.
Ville Laurikari
+1  A: 

You can achieve a very similar result using ulimit. The following command will run the ls command and limit its total CPU time to 60 seconds:

subprocess.Popen('ulimit -t 60; ls', shell=True)

If you need to limit the CPU percentage, then you'll need to install the cpulimit package:

sudo apt-get install cpulimit

You can execute cpulimit with the PID of your background process and adjust the CPU percentage accordingly. See

man cpulimit

for details.

Then you can kill the background process after 60 seconds if it hasn't finished.

fviktor
+4  A: 

Use the preexec_fn parameter to subprocess.Popen, and the resource module. Example:

parent.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import sys
import resource
import subprocess

def setlimits():
    # Set maximum CPU time to 1 second in child process, after fork() but before exec()
    print "Setting resource limit in child (pid %d)" % os.getpid()
    resource.setrlimit(resource.RLIMIT_CPU, (1, 1))

print "CPU limit of parent (pid %d)" % os.getpid(), resource.getrlimit(resource.RLIMIT_CPU)
p = subprocess.Popen(["./child.py"], preexec_fn=setlimits)
print "CPU limit of parent (pid %d) after startup of child" % os.getpid(), resource.getrlimit(resource.RLIMIT_CPU)
p.wait()
print "CPU limit of parent (pid %d) after child finished executing" % os.getpid(), resource.getrlimit(resource.RLIMIT_CPU)

child.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import sys
import resource

print "CPU limit of child (pid %d)" % os.getpid(), resource.getrlimit(resource.RLIMIT_CPU)

parent.py will fork into a new process. In the new process, it will call setlimits(), then exec child.py. This means the resource will be limited in the child process, but not in the parent.

Output when running program:

./parent.py
CPU limit of parent (pid 17404) (-1, -1)
Setting resource limit in child (pid 17405)
CPU limit of parent (pid 17404) after startup of child (-1, -1)
CPU limit of child (pid 17405) (1, 1)
CPU limit of parent (pid 17404) after child finished executing (-1, -1)

This is in many cases a better solution than trying to use ulimit, since it's not always a good idea to spawn subprocess via shell, especially since it often causes ugly parameter quoting trouble.

Erik Forsberg
Thanks Erik. It looks like this sets the limits on the python process, not on the external process?
Parand
The Python process and all of its children. (That is, the way it's supposed to be. ;) ) From the man page: Limits on the consumption of system resources by the current process and each process it creates may be obtained with the getrlimit() call, and set with the setrlimit() call.
Andrew Dalke
Yes, the resource package sets the limit on the python process (via setrlimit) - but in my example, it sets the limit on the subprocess created by subproces.Popen, before calling exec() to run the child.So, in the example, the calling process' limits is not affected, only the limits of the child.
Erik Forsberg