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 <marlonx80@hotmail.com>
Copyright 2011-2016, Jesse Smith <jessefrgsmith@yahoo.ca>





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-2.6.tar.gz

Then we run the makefile.

cd cpulimit-2.6
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



Note on compiling for non-Linux operating systems:
LimitCPU can be compiled on FreeBSD and OS X (though at this time
LimitCPU has not been tested and may not work properly on OS X).
To compile LimitCPU on these platforms, instead of running "make"
to build the executable, instead run either

make freebsd
or
make osx

in order to build on FreeBSD or OS X respectively.





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 --exe /usr/bin/bigexe --limit 50 -z

The "-z" flag tells LimitCPU to stop running once its target is
no longer running itself.

The following example is useful for scripts where we want
to launch a program and then immediately throttle it
without knowing its process ID. The "$!" symbol refers to
the last program run and the -b flag tells cpulimit to
run in the background, returning control to the shell.

/usr/bin/someapp &
cpulimit -p $! -l 25 -b


Note: As of version 1.7 LimitCPU will attempt to guess the
number of CPUs available on the machine and limit usage
accordingly. For example, machines with dual-cores will
be able to run processes with 1-200% limits. In case the
automatic detection does not work, users can over-ride the
number of CPUs LimitCPU thinks are available using the
-c command line flag. For example

cpulimit -c 2 -p 12345 -l 150


Commands can be launched by LimitCPU by appending the command
to the end of of LimitCPU's argument list. For example, the
following command will launch Firefox and limit it to 10% CPU
usage:

cpulimit -l 10 firefox

Sometimes we wish to launch other programs and pass them parameters.
To avoid confusing cpulimit as to which parameters are for it and
which ones are for the child process, we can use the -- flag. For
example, the following command launches Firefox in Private Browsing
mode. To make sure the "-p" in Firefox's "-private" option does not
confuse cpulimit, we use the -- flag.

cpulimit -l 25 -- firefox -private

In some special cases it may be desirable to kill a program
instead of simple throttling its CPU usage. In these cases
the -k flag can be used. For example, if we want to run a
program called "yellow" and kill it when it goes over 50%
CPU usage run the following:

cpulimit -l 50 -k yellow

The -k flag will terminate a process going over its limit,
but what if we want to bring back the killed process to
let it run again? For that purpose we have the -r flag. The
-r flag causes a killed process to be restored.

cpulimit -l 50 -k -r yellow

The restore flag (-r) only works when the process to launch
has been launched by cpulimit. For this reason it is necessary
to specify the target program at the end of the command line
as shown above.

LimitCPU, by default, will tell a watched process to continue
running when LimitCPU terminates. This is accomplished by
sending the watched process the SIGCONT signal just before
LimitCPU exits. The user can specify an alternative signal to
send the watched process when LimitCPU terminates. This is
accomplished using the -s or --signal command line flag. Here
is an example of terminating a watched process

cpulimit -l 25 -p 1234 -s SIGTERM

And here we accomplish the same thing using a numeric value
instead of the written form of the signal.

cpulimit -l 25 -p 1234 --signal=15

LimitCPU can be used to watch not only one target process, but also
child processes the target spawns. This means new processs the
target creates will also be throttled. By default, LimitCPU
only watches one target process and ignores children, but monitoring
children can be enabled using the "-m" or "--monitor-forks" flag.

cpulimit -l 25 -p 1234 -m



Accessing the latest code
============================

For developers who would like to test or modify the latest
LimitCPU code, the code is available in a Subversion (svn)
repository. The code can be checked out using the command

svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/limitcpu/code/ limitcpu-code




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.

