Can I set ulimit from node.js?

Question

I'd like to restrict child processes from writing too much data or taking up too much cpu time (infinite loop). In C, I'd call setrlimit(2) to do that. Is there something like this in node.js?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no node.js extension that provides setrlimit() functionality, but you can work around the limitation with a small shell workaround hack:

/bin/sh -c "ulimit -t 100; exec /usr/bin/node /my/node/program.js"

Looks like core node.js will never have setrlimit() now that it supports Windows and is no longer a POSIX-only framework: https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/2143

Update: I converted the rejected Node patch into a separate posix extension module which is now available in NPM and Github.

Answer 2

I think this newly-released module is just what you're looking for: https://github.com/melor/node-posix

Answer 3

I don't think there is any built-in method. However, you can occasionally check the memory usage of a process using process.memoryUsage() and kill the process manually.

Alternatively, if you know how long it is expected to run, you can specify a timeout as described here.