Crowding out OpenBSD

Crowding out OpenBSD

Posted Nov 15, 2012 14:45 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Crowding out OpenBSD by dlang
Parent article: Crowding out OpenBSD

I've gotten to the point that everything I build is now either a cluster, or at least potentially part of a cluster, so I look at anything with the question in mind of 'how would I do this if it was part of a cluster', and this mindset really makes me question the value of trying to have the init system be more clever in addressing this problem.

Funny that you are trying to use cluster-aware approach to oppose cgroups. You do remember that cgroups were invented by Google engineers to manage clusters, right? SystemD just applies the same logic to local system management.

One of the most common problems you run into when dealing with clusters isn't "the application exited or crashed", it's "The application is running, but wedged" I just don't see many cases where the cgroups approach to managing the app would have prevented problems (although, I freely admit that it has the 'cool' factor)

That's strange because I see tons of places where cgroups solve cluster-management problems. What happens with your cluster if some unimportant task start to eat memory or CPU endlessly? With cgroups answer is obvious: it's bound by cgroup's limit. What happens if some task must be killed and restarted because your node is overloaded? Cgroups make sure you can kill the task reliably. Sure, that means that your tasks must be written to be killable, but it makes sense for clusters anyway since failed PSU can do the same thing suddenly and without warning.

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