Check memory usage of subprocess in Python

I'm developing an application in Python on Ubuntu and I'm running external binaries from within python using subprocess. Since these binaries are generated at run time and can go rogue, I need to keep a strict tab on the amount of memory footprint and runtime of these binaries. Is there someway I can limit or monitor the memory usage of these binary programs at runtime? I would really hate to use something like "ps" in subprocess for th开发者_运维百科is purpose.

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You can use Python's resource module to set limits before spawning your subprocess.

For monitoring, resource.getrusage() will give you summarized information over all your subprocesses; if you want to see per-subprocess information, you can do the /proc trick in that other comment (non-portable but effective), or layer a Python program in between every subprocess and figure out some communication (portable, ugly, mildly effective).

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Having a PID number of your subprocess you can read all info from proc file-system. Use:

/proc/[PID]/smaps (since Linux 2.6.14) This file shows memory consumption for each of the process's mappings. For each of mappings there is a series of lines as follows:

or

/proc/[PID]/statm Provides information about memory usage, measured in pages.

Alternatively you can limit resources which subprocess can aquire with :

subprocess.Popen('ulimit -v 1024; ls', shell=True)

When given virtual memory limit is reached process fails with out of memory.