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I think I have found something that I need from the Linux kernel that is not currently implemented.

I need a way to set a max thread limit per process.

Is this possible?

cat pants
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    Just curious, why you need to limit the number of threads per process? – Andrew Case Aug 16 '12 at 22:04
  • Are you trying to set a system-wide limit on threads per process? Or are you trying to make it so that a particular process can set its own thread limit? Or what? – David Schwartz Aug 17 '12 at 00:12
  • I was hoping for the following functionality: "setthreadlimit -p 12543 -l 40" where -p is the pid and -l is the thread limit. So I want to be able to set a particular thread limit for a certain pid. – cat pants Aug 17 '12 at 17:25

1 Answers1

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From StackOverflow:

Linux doesn't have a separate threads per process limit, just a limit on the total number of processes on the system (threads are essentially just processes with a shared address space on Linux) which you can view like this:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/threads-max

The default is the number of memory pages/4. You can increase this like:

echo 100000 > /proc/sys/kernel/threads-max

There is also a limit on the number of processes (an hence threads) that a single user may create, see ulimit/getrlimit for details regarding these limits.

Community
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Andrew Case
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    "Linux doesn't have a separate threads per process limit, just a limit on the total number of processes on the system" So it looks like what I need is not currently possible. Time to go bug the kernel devs? :P (not really though) Thanks! – cat pants Aug 20 '12 at 19:47