How to limit the total resources (memory) of a process and its children

I am not sure if this answers your question, but I found this perl script that claims to do exactly what you are looking for. The script implements its own system for enforcing the limits by waking up and checking the resource usage of the process and its children. It seems to be well documented and explained, and has been updated recently.

As slm said in his comment, cgroups can also be used for this. You might have to install the utilities for managing cgroups, assuming you are on Linux you should look for libcgroups.

sudo cgcreate -t $USER:$USER -a $USER:$USER -g memory:myGroup

Make sure $USER is your user.

Your user should then have access to the cgroup memory settings in /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/myGroup.

You can then set the limit to, lets say 500 MB, by doing this:

echo 500000000 > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/myGroup/memory.limit_in_bytes

Now lets run Vim:

cgexec -g memory:myGroup vim

The vim process and all its children should now be limited to using 500 MB of RAM. However, I think this limit only applies to RAM and not swap. Once the processes reach the limit they will start swapping. I am not sure if you can get around this, I can not find a way to limit swap usage using cgroups.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/536046/4319:

On any systemd-based distro you can also use cgroups indirectly through systemd-run. E.g. for your case of limiting pdftoppm to 500M of RAM, use:

systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=500M pdftoppm

...

I created a script that does this, using cgmanager which is used in Ubuntu. One advantage is that this does not require root access. Note that cgroup management is a bit distro specific, so I don't know if this works on distros that use systemd cgroup management.

#!/bin/sh

set -eu

if [ "$#" -lt 2 ]
then
    echo Usage: `basename $0` "<limit> <command>..."
    exit 1
fi

limit="$1"
shift
cgname="limitmem_$$"
echo "limiting memory to $limit (cgroup $cgname) for command $@"

cgm create memory "$cgname" >/dev/null
cgm setvalue memory "$cgname" memory.limit_in_bytes "$limit" >/dev/null
# try also limiting swap usage, but this fails if the system has no swap
cgm setvalue memory "$cgname" memsw.limit_in_bytes "$limit" >/dev/null 2>&1 || true

# spawn subshell to run in the cgroup
set +e
(
set -e
cgm movepid memory "$cgname" `sh -c 'echo $PPID'` > /dev/null
exec "$@"
)
# grab exit code
exitcode=`echo $?`

set -e

echo -n "peak memory used: "
cgm getvalue memory "$cgname" memory.max_usage_in_bytes | tail -1 | cut -f2 -d\"

cgm remove memory "$cgname" >/dev/null
exit $exitcode

usage: save as limitmem in your path and make it executable. Then run e.g. limitmem 1G command.... This limit the actually used memory. If that is reached the OOM killer will kill the process or one of its children, but not something random that has nothing to do with this command.