A program to kill long-running runaway programs

Question

I manage Unix systems where, sometimes, programs like CGI scripts run forever, sometimes eating a lot of CPU time and wasting resources.

I want a program (typically invoked from cron) which can kill these runaways, based on the following criteria (combined with AND and OR):

• Name (given by a regexp)
• CPU time used
• elapsed time (for programs which are blocked on an I/O)

I do not really know what to type in a search engine for this sort of program. I certainly could write it myself in Python but I'm lazy and there is may be a good program already existing?

(I did not tag my question with a language name since a program in Perl or Ruby or whatever would work as well)

Answer 1

Most of the watchdig-like programs or libraries are just trying to see whether a given process is running, so I'd say you'd better off writing your own, using the existing libraries that give out process information.

Answer 2

Try using system-level quota enforcement instead. Most systems will allow to set per-process CPU time limit for different users.

Examples:

1. Linux: /etc/security/limits.conf
2. FreeBSD: /etc/login.conf

CGI scripts can usually be run under their own user ID, for example using mod_suid for Apache.

Answer 3

This might be something more like what you were looking for:

http://devel.ringlet.net/sysutils/timelimit/