[Beowulf] Users abusing screen

Prentice Bisbal prentice at ias.edu
Thu Oct 27 07:49:51 PDT 2011


On 10/27/2011 01:41 AM, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 05:14:13PM -0400, Steve Crusan wrote:
>
>> If the issue is processes that run for far too long, and are abusing
>> the system, cgroups or 'pushing' the users to use a batch system seems
>> to work better than writing scripts to make decisions on killing
>> processes.
> What I saw work well was nicing the process after a certain time,
> including an email, and then killing and emailing after a longer
> time. The emails can push the batch alternative. Users generally don't
> become angry if the limits are enforced by a script; they can only be
> surprised once, and that first time is just nicing the process. If
> they have a hard time predicting runtime (a common issue, especially
> for non-hardcore supercomputing types), it's not like they
> _intentionally_ are exceeding the limits...

Exactly. That's why I don't want to automate killing jobs longer than X
days.

Honestly, I can't believe how much controversy this discussion has
created. I thought my OP would go unnoticed. Next time, I'll just ask
which text editor I should use. ;)

--
Prentice



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