[solved] Kill process if it exceeds X of virtual memory

Question

I am using checkgmail and it has a serious memoryleak problem. After few hours of running, its memory usage goes from initial 50M, to 500M, to 2000M, and does not stop there.
So I am trying to have it killed and restarted if it exceeds, say, 200M.
What would be the best way of doing that?
Last edited by Lockheed (2014-02-16 17:29:02)

Answer 1

$ ps -C urxvtd -o rss=
42516
$ if [ $(ps -C urxvtd -o rss=) -gt "40960" ]; then echo 'KABOOM!'; fi
KABOOM!
urxvtd uses over 40MB RAM [1], so it exceeds the threshold I've set up.
Depending how often you want to check it, you can use cron or add a 'sleep' timer.
[1] I'm using just RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_set_size, but you can measure e.g. vsize too.
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocente … ine_ps.htm