On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 12:26:20PM +0000, Willy Tarreau wrote: > This patch makes it possible to enforce a per-user limit above which > new pipes will be limited to a single page, effectively limiting them > to 4 kB each. This has the effect of protecting the system against > memory abuse without hurting other users, and still allowing pipes to > work correctly though with less data at once. > > The limit is controlled by the new sysctl user-max-pipe-pages, and may > be disabled by setting it to zero. The default limit allows the default > number of FDs per process (1024) to create pipes of the default size > (64kB), thus reaching a limit of 64MB before starting to create only > smaller pipes. With 256 processes limited to 1024 FDs each, this results > in 1024*64kB + (256*1024 - 1024) * 4kB = 1084 MB of memory allocated for > a user. Regarding this, I was wondering if we shouldn't go a bit further and provide two limits instead of one : a soft and a hard limit. The soft limit would be the number of pages per user above which pipes are limited to a single page (what is implemented in the current patch). The hard limit would make any pipe creation attempt fail once reached. This way it would be possible to enforce a strict limit without limiting the number of processes or FDs too aggressively. This could be done easily in alloc_pipe_info() : + if (too_many_pipe_buffers_hard(user)) + return NULL; + if (too_many_pipe_buffers(user)) pipe_bufs = 1; I'm just having a hard time imagining acceptable names for the syscalls :-/ Willy -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html