Limiting processor speed for users?

[megatron 0]

Sorry for the lack of programming in this question, just hoping there are a couple of linux guru's who can help me out.

I have looked into CGroups which can limit the amount of RAM and CPU time a user can have. I am wondering if it is possible to reduce the cpu speed?

I am attempting to make an SSH server on my home box for university students to have a linux environment. It seems I can quota disk space and give them all a designated amount of RAM. I have a 3ghz dual core and would like to give 1ghz to each of them so compiling doesn't hog all of the CPU.

AFAIK CPU time is exactly that they can have a minute or an hour, but is there anything that can be done like this?

Thanks in advance.

[keskiverto]

"Reduce the speed"? Do you mean that the CPU should throttle down to 1GHz when they log in no matter how many other users are in the machine? No, you don't.

Make them nicer. That is, lower the priority of their processes. You can set that in environment (cannot recall how) or renice the sshd process, for sessions should inherit the priority from it.

[tcs]

Maybe setrlimit(2) would help?

[modoran]

If this is "your home box" then I suppose you are running a virtual machine for your Linux environment.

You can set CPU time from the virtual machine settings. This is most simple solution I can think of.