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  • The proposed solution does make it possible to limit the resident set size of a tree of processes. The behaviour seems to be different from RLIMIT_AS: it is possible to malloc more memory than is the limit, however it seems not to be possible to actually use more. Commented Jun 13, 2014 at 17:03
  • By default, the cgroup memory limit applies only to (approximately) the physical RAM use. There's a kernel option (CONFIG_MEMCG_SWAP) to enable swap accounting; see the kernel docs for details. Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 15:47
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    On fedora, sudo yum install libcgroup-tools Commented Mar 10, 2015 at 11:46
  • Note that if your OS is running systemd (pretty much all Linux distros these days) you're not supposed to use cgmanager nor cgcreate as far as I know. I think the officially supported systemd way is to use systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=500M ... but it has been buggy in many distros so make sure to test if it actually works with your distro. In my experience, some versions will silently fail – they will run the command but will not limit the memory usage. Commented May 9, 2022 at 9:29