CPU Caps: A Gift from the Heavens

To quote Dan Price:

Andrei just released a public Beta of his latest project– CPU Caps, which is a new and very useful resource management feature for Solaris, and for zones.
Unlike CPU shares, CPU caps let you naturally limit CPU usage for a project or for a zone. My favorite part is that you talk to the system about these caps in terms of percentage of a CPU. So, a cap of “150″ means “150%” or “never use more than 1 and 1/2 CPUs”.

I’ve been waiting at least a decade for this, and to be honest when Zones came out and didn’t have this feature I was more than a little disapointed.. But now.. it’s here! Per zone! Per app! My god man!

I haven’t slept much this week and was planning on crashing early tonight to catch up, but clearly that will have to wait. I need to start capping CPUs, damnit!

About this entry

You’re currently reading “CPU Caps: A Gift from the Heavens,” an entry on VMUNIX Blues

Published:: 04.05.06 / 10pm

Category:: solaris, opensolaris

About

VMUNIX Blues is written by me, Mark Mayo, in Vancouver, BC. I like unix, coding, and the web, and naturally most articles I write here have something to do with what I like. If commenting on an article isn’t your style, you can always email me — mark (at) vmunix.com.

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Fazal Majid 04.05.06 / 10pm

I’m usually more interested in capping disk I/O, but I/O schedulers are harder than CPU ones, and get short shrift.

mark 04.05.06 / 11pm

Let’s hope Disk Cap is Andrei’s next project.

François 04.06.06 / 8am

What is the purpose of that feature? CPU share is good enough. Why caping a process when you can give him a minimum guarantied cpu usage?

For testing only, and even there…

Dan Price 04.06.06 / 10am

François, shares represent an entitlement to a certain amount of CPU. But they don’t limit how much CPU you can use if the system is idle. A lot of customers want to be able to put a workload onto a machine and know that no matter what happens, it won’t use more than (for example) 25% of one CPU.

Frankly, I think that CPU caps is going to wind up being more popular than shares, mostly because they are simpler to understand.

David Comay 06.20.06 / 5pm

Just an update that a resync of Andrei’s CPU Caps is available
that is based of Solaris Express build 40. For more details, please
see

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/rm/rctls/cpu-caps/

mark 06.20.06 / 7pm

Cool. I just finished playing with build41 so I think I’ll give the cpu-cap enabled build 40 a try. Thanks for the update David.