multithreading - How to set memory limit for thread or process in python?

Question

I'm writing program in Python which would be able to run untrusted python code in some kind of sandbox. So, I need a way to limit the amount of memory that untrusted code can allocate. At now I can limit the maximum length of range(), list, dictionary and the others by overriding default python data structures in my sandboxed environment.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Under Unix, you could use resource.setrlimit(resource.RLIMIT_AS, ...) to restrict "the maximum area (in bytes) of address space which may be taken by the process."

import sys
import resource
soft, hard = 10**7, 10**7
# soft, hard = 10**8, 10**8   # uncommenting this allows program to finish
resource.setrlimit(resource.RLIMIT_AS,(soft, hard))
memory_hog = {}
try:
    for x in range(10000):
        print(x)
        memory_hog[str(x)]='The sky is so blue'
except MemoryError as err:
    sys.exit('memory exceeded')
    # memory exceeded