memstop

It's pretty naive, it cat's from /proc/mem and extracts MemTotal and MemAvailable: https://github.com/surban/memstop/blob/master/memstop.c#L40-.... In other words, that's not how virtual memory works. And I actually don't know how I would go and solve this problem because of the way commit, overcommit, and paging algorithms can intervene with the goal.

Hey HN, I built a small tool to solve a problem on my build VM, which has 32 CPU cores but only 16GB of RAM. Running make -j32 would frequently fail when the OOM killer terminated a compiler process. Throttling with a lower -j count felt inefficient, and make's load-average flag (-l) tracks CPU, not memory pressure. So, I created Memstop. It's a simple LD_PRELOAD library that acts as a gatekeeper. Before each new process starts, it checks the available memory in /proc/meminfo. If memory is below a configurable percentage (default 10%), it simply pauses and waits for other processes to finish. This allows my builds to use full parallelism, self-regulating by pausing when memory gets tight instead of crashing. Usage is simple: LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/memstop.so make -j32 You can control the threshold with the MEMSTOP_PERCENT environment variabl