cronjob to watch for runaway processes and kill them I have a runaway ruby process - I know exactly how I trigger it. Point is, it got me thinking about runaway processes (CPU usage or memory usage). * How would one monitor runaway processes with cron? grep / top / ulimit? * Can one notify the user via the command line if something like this happens? * What alternatives are there to Monit?

Instead of writing a script yourself you could use the verynice utility. Its main focus is on dynamic process renicing but it also has the option to kill runaway processes and is easily configured.