[PLUG] User limits in Linux

[Daniel Herrington]

Not sure how what the current value is set to, nor by how much they fell
they can raise it.

The context is that we have an enterprise job scheduler (like cron, only
enteprrise based instead of local) that is starting processes on this
machine. One of the application groups came back and said they had
processes failing with this error. It appears the user has limits set on
the number of processes it can open. When the scheduling team asked about
increasing the proc limit to unlimited, the sys admins replied that it
wasn't possible in Linux.

For user sessions I have used ulimit -s unlimited on RHEL before and though
that was what was occurring. But then if I edited limits.conf I've always
put a value in, so thought maybe unlimited was not really possible after
all. That maybe the true source of the sys admins, that they need a value
to put in limits.conf.

In the context of having to execute background processes for a user (either
through cron or another solution) how do you set procs to unlimited in
limits.conf?

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 6:00 AM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com>wrote:

> On Wed, 27 Feb 2013, Daniel Herrington wrote:
>
> > This just came across from our Sys Admin team:
> > *
> > "They may be able to increase it [user processes] a little, but probably
> > not enough to resolve the problem, which was the case last time we saw
> this
> > issue. Linux [user processes] cannot be set to unlimited like other unix
> > flavors."*
> >
> > I find this hard to believe. However, the more I think about it maybe
> it's
> > true since you need to put a # in /etc/security/limits.conf?
>
> Daniel,
>
>    For those of us not in the profession please explain the context of this
> issue. Does it refer to the number of processes owned by each user, the
> resources used by all processes owned by a user, or something else?
>
> Just curious,
>
> Rich
>
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-- 
Daniel B. Herrington
Nike