nixpkgs/nixos/doc/manual/administration/control-groups.xml
2019-06-17 13:25:50 +02:00

65 lines
3 KiB
XML
Raw Blame History

This file contains ambiguous Unicode characters

This file contains Unicode characters that might be confused with other characters. If you think that this is intentional, you can safely ignore this warning. Use the Escape button to reveal them.

<chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
version="5.0"
xml:id="sec-cgroups">
<title>Control Groups</title>
<para>
To keep track of the processes in a running system, systemd uses
<emphasis>control groups</emphasis> (cgroups). A control group is a set of
processes used to allocate resources such as CPU, memory or I/O bandwidth.
There can be multiple control group hierarchies, allowing each kind of
resource to be managed independently.
</para>
<para>
The command <command>systemd-cgls</command> lists all control groups in the
<literal>systemd</literal> hierarchy, which is what systemd uses to keep
track of the processes belonging to each service or user session:
<screen>
<prompt>$ </prompt>systemd-cgls
├─user
│ └─eelco
│ └─c1
│ ├─ 2567 -:0
│ ├─ 2682 kdeinit4: kdeinit4 Running...
│ ├─ <replaceable>...</replaceable>
│ └─10851 sh -c less -R
└─system
├─httpd.service
│ ├─2444 httpd -f /nix/store/3pyacby5cpr55a03qwbnndizpciwq161-httpd.conf -DNO_DETACH
│ └─<replaceable>...</replaceable>
├─dhcpcd.service
│ └─2376 dhcpcd --config /nix/store/f8dif8dsi2yaa70n03xir8r653776ka6-dhcpcd.conf
└─ <replaceable>...</replaceable>
</screen>
Similarly, <command>systemd-cgls cpu</command> shows the cgroups in the CPU
hierarchy, which allows per-cgroup CPU scheduling priorities. By default,
every systemd service gets its own CPU cgroup, while all user sessions are in
the top-level CPU cgroup. This ensures, for instance, that a thousand
run-away processes in the <literal>httpd.service</literal> cgroup cannot
starve the CPU for one process in the <literal>postgresql.service</literal>
cgroup. (By contrast, it they were in the same cgroup, then the PostgreSQL
process would get 1/1001 of the cgroups CPU time.) You can limit a
services CPU share in <filename>configuration.nix</filename>:
<programlisting>
<link linkend="opt-systemd.services._name_.serviceConfig">systemd.services.httpd.serviceConfig</link>.CPUShares = 512;
</programlisting>
By default, every cgroup has 1024 CPU shares, so this will halve the CPU
allocation of the <literal>httpd.service</literal> cgroup.
</para>
<para>
There also is a <literal>memory</literal> hierarchy that controls memory
allocation limits; by default, all processes are in the top-level cgroup, so
any service or session can exhaust all available memory. Per-cgroup memory
limits can be specified in <filename>configuration.nix</filename>; for
instance, to limit <literal>httpd.service</literal> to 512 MiB of RAM
(excluding swap):
<programlisting>
<link linkend="opt-systemd.services._name_.serviceConfig">systemd.services.httpd.serviceConfig</link>.MemoryLimit = "512M";
</programlisting>
</para>
<para>
The command <command>systemd-cgtop</command> shows a continuously updated
list of all cgroups with their CPU and memory usage.
</para>
</chapter>