Manual:$wgShellCgroup
| <translate> Shell and process control</translate>: $wgShellCgroup | |
|---|---|
| Limit shell commands memory using linux Cgroups. |
|
| <translate> Introduced in version:</translate> | 1.21.0 (Gerrit change 47559; git #674962b3) |
| <translate> Removed in version:</translate> | <translate> still in use</translate> |
| <translate> Allowed values:</translate> | (string) |
| <translate> Default value:</translate> | false |
| <translate> Other settings:</translate> <translate> Alphabetical</translate> | <translate> By function</translate> | |
Under Linux: a cgroup directory used to constrain memory usage of shell commands. The directory must be writable by the user which runs MediaWiki.
If specified, this is used instead of ulimit, which is inaccurate, and causes malloc() to return NULL, which exposes bugs in C applications, making them segfault or deadlock.
A wrapper script will create a cgroup for each shell command that runs, as a subgroup of the specified cgroup. If the memory limit is exceeded, the kernel will send a SIGKILL signal to a process in the subgroup. (MediaWiki will often report this error as error code 137, after the bash return status of a command receiving SIGKILL)
Set up
If cgroups are not set up, you may have to mount the cgroup filesystem. As root:
mount -t tmpfs cgroup_root /sys/fs/cgroup mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/memory mount -t cgroup cgroup_memory -omemory /sys/fs/cgroup/memory
Next you need to do MediaWiki specific configuration:
mkdir -p /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/mediawiki mkdir -m 0777 /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/mediawiki/job
The reliability of cgroup cleanup can be improved by installing a notify_on_release script in the root cgroup (This step is optional).
- Copy modules/mediawiki/files/cgroup/cgroup-mediawiki-clean from operations/puppet.git to /usr/local/bin/cgroup-mediawiki-clean
- Run the command
echo "/usr/local/bin/cgroup-mediawiki-clean" > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/release_agent
Last of all, enable cgroups in your LocalSettings.php
echo '$wgShellCgroup = "/sys/fs/cgroup/memory/mediawiki/job";' >> LocalSettings.php
The reliability of cgroup cleanup can be improved by installing a notify_on_release script in the root cgroup, see e.g. gerrit:40784
Troubleshooting
If cgroups don't work, things to try:
- Install cgroup-bin package
- Run the command
cat /proc/cgroups. If the memory subsystem has a 0 under enabled, then memory cgroups may be disabled in your kernel. Try rebooting your computer withcgroup_enable=memory swapaccount=1on the kernel command line. - Older bash doesn't like the readarray call in limit.sh. You should use at least 4.1
