ulimit

Set system-wide per-process limits (rlimits)

The file /etc/initscript is used by init to execute the commands in /etc/inittab. As any process it started from init, it is a convenient place to adjust per process limits (rlimits). The script provided here does set limits on the memory usage per process (amongst setting other limits) and thus prevents that a single process that leaks memory can cause your system to run out of memory and provoke the system to crawl (trash on the swap partition) before it rescues itself by killing processes (but unfortunately does not always hit the right process with the first try). The script sets the limits in percent of available memory, thus the defaults may match a large range of systems. Configuration is done in file /etc/sysconfig/ulimit. Per user rlimit settings can be configured by filling in /etc/security/limits.conf and using the pam_limits.so functionality. More finegrained resource management (per process group), can be done via control groups (containers) with SLE11/openSUSE11.1 or newer.