Is there a way to disable memory limits for docker containers.

[ryanmickler]

On my nomad agent, I only have two tasks running: a database service and a logging sidecar.

This database container is designed to max out memory usage on the host. I want to be able to disable nomad's ability to OOM kill this process, because although sometimes it uses 99.5% of the memory on the host, it is designed to.

Is there a way to do this?

Nomad Version 0.8.7

[www-aiqu-no]

Rhe nomad docker plugin doesn't currently support this (memory is hard limit), but you could configure the client to advertise more memory than it actually has:

https://nomadproject.io/docs/configuration/client/#inlinecode-memory_total_mb

Would probably introduce more/other problems..

I think this would be best to configure in the task itself. What is the database, and is there no way to enforce restriction on resources? You can set the amount of memory allocated to each docker task (resource parameter), and this value is available to the container

[shoenig]

Hey @ryanmickler thanks for the use case! With the docker driver, the memory resource ascribed to the task (configurable w/ default 300MB) is going to be enforced - there isn't currently a way to disable that with Nomad. To directly achieve what you ask, you could resort to the raw_exec driver which will not enforce memory use - there's a similar thread of discussion in #2082. (Of course, the risk of the kernel's OOM killer unexpectedly killing important system processes like sshd or the nomad agent apply - one of the key benefits of Nomad is being able to isolate tasks using the advanced drivers).

In the future we would like to add support for "soft" memory limits, enabling an over-subscription use case which may help here, but that doesn't exist yet.

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