README for LimitCPU ========================== LimitCPU is a program to throttle the CPU cycles used by other applications. LimitCPU will monitor a process and make sure its CPU usage stays at or below a given percentage. This can be used to make sure your system has plenty of CPU cycles available for other tasks. It can also be used to keep laptops cool in the face of CPU-hungry processes and for limiting virtual machines. LimitCPU is the direct child of CPUlimit, a creation of Angelo Marletta, which can be found at http://cpulimit.sourceforge.net. Copying, License and Distribution =================================== LimitCPU is licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 2). A copy of the license should be included with this program in a file named LICENSE. Copyright 2005, Angelo Marletta Copyright 2011, Jesse Smith Where to get LimitCPU ========================== The LimitCPU program can be aquired from http://limitcpu.sourceforge.net How to compile and install =========================== Once you have downloaded a copy of LimitCPU building should be fairly straight forward. First we unpack the source code tar zxf cpulimit-1.4.tar.gz Then we run the makefile. cd cpulimit-1.4 make This should produce the executable file "cpulimit". If you would like to install the program to make it available system-wide, run make install Later should you wish to remove the program from your system, run the following command from the limitcpu directory make deinstall Common usage ========================== The LimitCPU program is generally used to throttle the CPU usage of one process. This can be done with the following command where 12345 is the process ID number of a running program and 25 is the maximum percentage of the CPU we are willing to give that program cpulimit -p 12345 -l 25 The above example will cause LimitCPU to keep an eye on the process with ID number 12345 until the program exits. Should we wish to run LimitCPU in the background we can use cpulimit -p 12345 -l 25 -b We can also limit running processes based on their name instead of their process ID, as in this example: cpulimit --exe /usr/bin/bigexe --limit 50 The above example will keep an eye on "bigexe" and, if the application quits and another program called "bigexe" is run, LimitCPU will monitor the new process too. Should we wish to only track the first program and then exit, we can use cpulimit --exec /usr/bin/bigexe --limit 50 -z The "-z" flag tells LimitCPU to stop running once its target is no longer running itself. Bugs and Feedback ============================= Should you have comments, questions, or bugs to report, please send an e-mail to jessefrgsmith@yahoo.ca with the word "LimitCPU" in the subject line.