cpulimit is a simple program that attempts to limit the cpu usage of a process (expressed in percentage, not in cpu time). This is useful to control batch jobs, when you don’t want them to eat too much cpu. It does not act on the nice value or other scheduling priority stuff, but on the real cpu usage. Also, it is able to adapt itself to the overall system load, dynamically and quickly.

How it works

Note that you don’t need to read this paragraph in order to use cpulimit, you can safely skip it if you are not interested in tweaking cpulimit.

So, you are curious to know the secrets of cpulimit Of course there is no secret if you are a C developer, but I will try to explain to everyone. The work of cpulimit is done all in userspace, so it doesn’t interfere with the Linux scheduler. Basically, the target process, which you can specify by pid, name, or command line, is continuosly paused and resumed by sending it SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals. Signals are sent by cpulimit in appropriate moments, based on the limit specified by user and the process statistics read from /proc. Continue Reading cpulimit – Limit the cpu usage of a process