tania 1.0.1

A greedy processes sniper

A greedy processes killer

Tania is a python script designed to kill processes that should not be there on a computing cluster's frontend, generally because users forgot (or do not know how to) launch their program into a proper job. You can customize which processes should be monitored (targets) and which should be whitelisted (allies), based on their name, owner, cputime and memory size (rss). Tania is designed to be run as a cron job.

Installation

Install tania:

git clone https://github.com/bzizou/tania
cd tania
pip install .

Copy tania.conf and tania_targets.json to an appropriate location, for example /etc, and customize those files. You can set up the $TANIA_CONF_FILE variable if you placed the config file into another location than /etc.

sudo cp etc/tania.conf /etc
sudo cp etc/tania_targets.json /etc
# Edit tania.conf and tania_targets.json
# WARNING: tania can kill system processes if not configured properly!

Usage

tania --help
Usage: tania [options]

Options:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  -D, --do       Actualy do kill bad processes
  -v, --verbose  Be more verbose
  -m, --mail     Send an email to the familly of the deceased

By default, tania does nothing and only prints the PID of the processes that should be killed:

root@f-dahu:~# tania               
Warning: 1827444 is in the viewfinder 
Warning: 210765 is in the viewfinder  
Warning: 3317806 is in the viewfinder 

You can print more informations, to know the reasons of the kills:

root@dahu:~# tania -v
We should kill 1670118 ( yes ) of bzizou with cputime 4 (limit  1 )
We should kill 1666340 ( stress-ng-vm [run] ) of bzizou with memory 212292 (limit  200000 )

To actually kill the processes, use --do:

root@dahu:~# tania --do
Shooting down process 1670118

The --mail option will send an e-mail to the owner of the killed process using the mail templates from the config file.

Finally, Tania is meant to be run frequently from cron. Here's an example cron job configuration:

# cat /etc/cron.d/tania                                  
*/2 * * * * root tania --do --mail |grep -v Warning

Why this name "Tania" ?

Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tania_Chernova