Resource control with systemd

I’m receiving more requests for upload accounts to the Deb-o-Matic servers lately (yay!), but that means the resources need to be monitored and shared between the build daemons to prevent server lockups.

My servers are running systemd, so I decided to give systemd.resource-control a try. My goal was to assign lower CPU shares to the build processes (debomatic itself, sbuild, and all the related tools), in order to avoid blocking other important system services from being spawned when necessary.

I created a new slice, and set a lower CPU share weight:
$ cat /etc/systemd/system/debomatic.slice
[Slice]
CPUAccounting=true
CPUShares=512
$


Then, I assigned the slice to the service unit file controlling debomatic daemons by adding the Slice=debomatic.slice option under the Service directive.

That was not enough, though, as some processes were assigned to the user slice instead, which groups all the processes spawned by users:

This is probably because schroot spawns a login shell, and systemd considers it belonging to a different process group. So, I had to launch the command systemctl set-property user.slice CPUShares=512, so all processes belonging to the user.slice will receive the same share of the debomatic ones. I consider this a workaround, I’m open to suggestions how to properly solve this issue 🙂

I’ll try to explore more options in the coming days, so I can improve my knowledge of systemd a little bit more 🙂