san's questions

We would like to allocate chunks of cpu-time and RAM-hours to the users every few months. This is on a Linux server. I think process accounting can help keep track of usage but it does not enforce a usage policy. What would be a good way to enforce a usage policy. What we want is something like a bank account from which an user can withdraw cpu-time and memory-hours.

If I understand correctly ulimit puts a cap on different resources per shell instance and hence seems inadequate. I would appreciate if you correct me if I am wrong about ulimit. I suspect I am.

I am looking for a daemon that logs, the amount of resource, utilized by every user. For every user, I would like to record the cpu-time and memory used over the lifetime of his/her processes. If possible the amount of time the process spent in different states [R, D, S].

This is something in the line of the sadc family of tools, but I do not think it logs per user data. Could someone point me to a tool which does what I want ? This seems to be too common a task not to have a standard tool around for. So wanted to check before writing something quick and dirty that surely will not be as well thought out as an existing tool.

A similar question was asked here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5800032/finding-users-resource-utilization-in-ubuntu-linux What I am looking for is a tool rather how to do it programatically.