[Chicago-talk] Limiting system impact.

[Jim Jacobus]

Is there any way to limit, from within the Perl script, the amount of 
memory or CPU a Perl process utilizes? I've got a script on a Redhat 
Linux system that crunches a lot of data. Script and output are ok, 
but the process can take up to 30 minutes wall clock time. As a 
result the system appears to slow down considerably until the the 
script finishes. I tried adding a few WAIT commands in the script, 
but it didn't help much. The system reads some really large files, 
parses the info and stores it in some hashes for later processing. So 
I'm using I/o, memory and CPU. It would be good if I could lower the 
process priority of the script when it's running so the O/S could 
give more weight to other processes.