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Matei Zaharia commented on MAPREDUCE-1221: ------------------------------------------ Setrlimit does *not* set a cumulative limit for the children. If you setrlimit to 1 GB for a process, and then it spawns the child, the child gets a separate 1 GB limit, and together they have 2 GB. Some newer features in Linux (cgroups and containers) can be used to set a limit on a whole process tree. However, I think the goal of this patch is different - it's to let the jobs use however much memory they want without declaring it in advance, but fix things when we do overcommit. > Kill tasks on a node if the free physical memory on that machine falls below > a configured threshold > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Key: MAPREDUCE-1221 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAPREDUCE-1221 > Project: Hadoop Map/Reduce > Issue Type: Improvement > Components: tasktracker > Affects Versions: 0.22.0 > Reporter: dhruba borthakur > Assignee: Scott Chen > Fix For: 0.22.0 > > Attachments: MAPREDUCE-1221-v1.patch, MAPREDUCE-1221-v2.patch, > MAPREDUCE-1221-v3.patch > > > The TaskTracker currently supports killing tasks if the virtual memory of a > task exceeds a set of configured thresholds. I would like to extend this > feature to enable killing tasks if the physical memory used by that task > exceeds a certain threshold. > On a certain operating system (guess?), if user space processes start using > lots of memory, the machine hangs and dies quickly. This means that we would > like to prevent map-reduce jobs from triggering this condition. From my > understanding, the killing-based-on-virtual-memory-limits (HADOOP-5883) were > designed to address this problem. This works well when most map-reduce jobs > are Java jobs and have well-defined -Xmx parameters that specify the max > virtual memory for each task. On the other hand, if each task forks off > mappers/reducers written in other languages (python/php, etc), the total > virtual memory usage of the process-subtree varies greatly. In these cases, > it is better to use kill-tasks-using-physical-memory-limits. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - You can reply to this email to add a comment to the issue online.