I have a few machines that I machine that I use for running large numbers of jobs where I try to limit the number of jobs so as not to exceed the available RAM of the machine. Occasionally I mis-estimate how much memory some of the jobs will take, and the machine starts thrashing the swap file. I resolve this by sending the kill -s STOP to one of the jobs so that it can get swapped out.

Does anyone know of a utility that will monitor a server for processes by a specific name, and then pause the one with the smallest memory footprint is the total memory consumption reaches a desired threshold so that the larger ones can run and complete with a minimum of swap file thrashing? Paused processes then need to be resumed once some existing processes have completed.