The use-case for per-application resource counters

Administrators of *NIX-based systems are quite accustomed to viewing resource counters strewn throughout the system, in places like /proc, /sys and more recently /cgroup or /sys/fs/cgroup.  With the release of RHEL6 came widespread enterprise adoption of Control Groups (cgroups), which had been implemented steadily over a series of years, and vetted both there as well as in Fedora (RHEL’s upstream).

Implementing cgroups not only let sysadmins carve up a single OS into multiple logical partitions, it also bought them per-cgroup counters that the kernel maintains.  That’s in addition to common use-cases such as quality of service guarantees or charge-back.

Continue reading “nsinit: per-container resource monitoring of Docker containers on RHEL/Fedora” →