UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Is there a way of throttling a process resources, something akin to limits but for processes not users? ie I want processX to be restricted in the amount of memory it can consume. For process cpu I guess I can simply nice the process, but total memory consumption is my primary concern.

ulimit in the process shell script or call setrlimit() in C code.

is there an easy way to make this apply across an infrastructure of servers, though? See limits.conf is easier to deploy.

If I have to go around editing init scripts everywhere then this will drive me nuts, even if automatable, as every time any of them upgrades the software the change will be lost and I'll have to go back to editing or automated editing of all the init scripts across all of the servers and and across all distributions... arrrg.

I'd like something more similar to limits.conf but specifying a process name rather than a user name if possible...

a process name == an executable image file

write a shell script that runs the process you want. put a ulimit call in the shell script.
assume the image file name = /usr/local/bin/foo
1. cp /usr/local/bin/foo /usr/local/bin/fooimage
2. create a shell script then cp smallshell.sh /usr/local/bin/foo
The script calls ulimit then runs /usr/local/bin/fooimage

We do this to shut off/turn on ftp and sftp on certain nodes under some conditions. It takes only a few minutes to do this on about 400 blade servers running linux.

You will have to write another small shell script to deploy this across servers.