Re: xargs -P0 suport

From: Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 20:05:52 +0200
On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 01:43:21PM -0400, Nikolai Lifanov wrote:
> On 05/22/15 13:27, Mateusz Guzik wrote:
> > On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 12:32:52PM -0400, Allan Jude wrote:
> >> There is some question about if nargs is a sane value for maxprocs in
> >> the negative case. 5000 does seem a bit high, and the behaviour can get
> >> wonky depending on the order you specify -P and -n together on the
> >> command line.
> >>
> >> Any suggestions?
> >>
> > 
> > GNU xargs imposes no limit whatsoever, but it also supports reallocating
> > its process table, while our xargs allocates one upfront and does not
> > change it.
> > 
> > I would say reading hard proc resource limit and using that as the limit
> > would do the job just fine.
> > 
> 
> GNU xargs uses MAX_INT for this limit. Our xargs performs much worse
> with it for a reason I haven't investigated. The 5000 number doesn't
> seem high and I have workflows that do '.... | xargs -n1 -P0 ...'
> spawning about this many jobs.
> 

Strictly speaking MAX_INT is indeed the upper limit, but the number is
so big it's not a limit in practice and it's not going to be in
foreseeable future.

As noted earlier our xargs allocates the table upfront, which with
MAX_INT limit means several MBs allocated for no good reason.

For all practical purposes grabbing hard limit for processes and capping
it with pid_max will have the end result of xargs not limiting the
amount of processes.

-- 
Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik gmail.com>
Received on Fri May 22 2015 - 16:05:58 UTC

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