ulimit2 Cookbook

A cookbook to set resource limits via ulimit.

Requirements

Should support any linux platform, but has been tested successfully on:

• rhel >= 5.0
• centos >= 5.0
• fedora >= 17.0
• debian >= 6.0
• ubuntu >= 12.04

Attributes

ulimit2::default

• ['ulimit']['conf_dir']
  
  Type: String
  
  Description: The directory to store the config file in
  
  Default: /etc/security/limits.d

• ['ulimit']['conf_file']
  
  Type: String
  
  Description: The file containing the resource limits
  
  Default: 999-chef-ulimit.conf

Usage

ulimit2::default

Set attributes in the ulimit/params namespace to set resource limits. Example values:

node.set['ulimit']['params']['default']['nofile'] = 2000 # Set hard and soft open file limit to 2000 for all users
node.set['ulimit']['params']['default']['nproc']['soft'] = 2000 # Set the soft per-user process limit to 2000 for all users
node.set['ulimit']['params']['root']['nofile']['soft'] = 8000   # Set the soft open file limit to 8000 for the 'root' user
node.set['ulimit']['params']['root']['nofile']['hard'] = 'unlimited' # Set the hard open file limit to unlimited for the 'root' user
node.set['ulimit']['params']['@sysadmin']['nproc']['hard'] = 2500  # Set the hard process limit to 2500 for the 'sysadmin' group

Then, just include ulimit2 in your node's run_list:

{
  "name":"my_node",
  "run_list": [
    "recipe[ulimit2]"
  ]
}

For systems that don't support individual configuration files, meaning they only support settings in the /etc/security/limits.conf, set ulimit/conf_dir attribute to '/etc/security' and ulimit/conf_file attribute to 'limits.conf'; or whatever setting is appropriate to your system.

The default ulimit/conf_file attribute value gives us a reasonable chance of being the last config file applied. The files are processed according to their ASCII sort order, so there is still room to add more files to be processed after the recipe default file by naming the config file with leading character prefixes (ex. zzz-last.conf).

License and Authors

Authors: Michael Morris

License: 3-clause BSD