Limiting a Process to a set amount of available Memory

Greetings fellow Macs.

Is there a way to limit particular Process to a set amount of RAM? And, make it permanent, if possible.

For instance:
prevent the process- DTDKSymbolHelper -from using any more than 512MB of real memory. Currently this process can use up to 1.3GB or more of memory!


My Specs:
MacBook Pro 13" (mid 2009)
OS X 10.6.6
4GB RAM (from 2GB)

No there most likely isn't a way to limit a process to a certain amount of memory, modern OS' portray RAM as infinite through first making physical RAM available and when that begins to shrink swapping unused pages of RAM to the hard disk to make more of it available, this is how the system can operate for as long as they do with programs coming and going..

Why are you interested in limiting this application anyway? Is it causing some issue on your Mac? Are you just worried about the high number?

Regards

@Raz0rEdge
Thank you for the fast reply and inquiry..
Here's my situation/details:

My Issue -
I identified the process to be (from top command line): DTDKSymbolHelper

it runs ONLY when Organizer in Xcode launches after I connect my iPhone 3G for testing my app. A pop-up shows:

Unknown iOS detected
Xcode does not have debugging information for the version of iOS on the device named “master”. Xcode can collect debugging data from the device to enable development with this version of iOS. This process only needs to be done once per iOS version, and will take several minutes.

either choose "Cancel" or "Collect"

If I hit "Cancel" I am not able to use my device to test my app.
If I hit "Collect" it does what it states, but would grind the system down to a halt AND requires me to do this EVERYTIME I launch Xcode, even though it says it "...needs to be done once per iOS version"

That process will take up to 1.3GB or more of RAM when it gets going. It will release after it's done, after 3-4 minutes.

What I have tried -
1. kill the specific process: DTDKSymbolHelper - but again I am left with not being able to use my iPhone.
2. Close All other programs other than Xcode - doesn't help it will still take up that much memory.
3. Upgraded my RAM from 2GB to 4GB - Hasn't helped.


Specs:
MacBook Pro 13" (mid 2009)
OS X 10.6.6
4GB RAM (from 2GB)

Xcode v. 3.2.5
iOS (on iPhone 3G) 4.2.1

Any help will be much appreciated.

Thank you for posting the full issue, this post should probably be moved to the Development forum..

I've played with Xcode and have deployed apps to the simulator but not to a device, so I'm not really sure what's going on there..

But just as a test, have you tried uninstalling and re-install Xcode to see if it changes anything??

Regards

You could look into using ulimit. I'm not familiar with it so I suggest that you do further reading before using it.

Raz0rEdge said:

Thank you for posting the full issue, this post should probably be moved to the Development forum..

I've played with Xcode and have deployed apps to the simulator but not to a device, so I'm not really sure what's going on there..

But just as a test, have you tried uninstalling and re-install Xcode to see if it changes anything??

Regards

Click to expand...

Certainly, I figured the details would be helpful...
Okay, who should I ask to move this post?

The re-install option would be my Last resort. Because after you pay Apple for the developer license, there's quite a few More steps to get/set profiles and certificates into Xcode to get it fully operational with your test hardware. I really don't want to go through that right now... a re-install will loose all those profiles & certificates.

vansmith said:

You could look into using ulimit. I'm not familiar with it so I suggest that you do further reading before using it.

Click to expand...

Well, thank you for the suggestion.
Hopefully a member who has used ulimit will chime in on this.
(Because, for me at least, reading the man pages without Working examples makes it a tad difficult for me to comprehend it's direct usage.)

****

I know that back in the dark ages - OS 9.x - you were able to limit physical memory per application. Which I used.

And, in OS X:

I read about launchd and there's quite a few sites that just rehash its man page, without working examples how to make this command work for my situation.

Same goes for setrlimit...

Anyone who's more familiar with these commands, please enlighten a fellow mac-brethren on how to (or even if it can) do what I've stated.

I would be sincerely grateful.

bump..

anyone?

Just an update...

No luck in finding any answer(s) yet.

I have just installed Xcode 4.0 (March 14, 2011)
I am still experiencing the same exact problem.