What even is this?

It's a docker container that will take up more memory as times goes on. By default, it will increase it's memory consumption by 8MB every second, until it hits 128MB and then it will return. If it fails to malloc() at any point in time, it will return with a non-zero return code.

What's this mangle.py?

If one changes the C code, in order to make this Dockerfile distributable easily, mangle.py will generate a new Dockerfile with the C code already embedded. So, to generate the Dockerfile, just run python mangle.py.

How to make it do more or less?

Here's a list of environment variables that will change it's behaviour:

• MEMORY_LIMIT - setting this to a positive integer will set the limit on how much memory the container eventually will allocate in megabytes.
• MEMORY_INCREMENT - setting this to a postivie integer will change the amount of megabytes the container will allocate every second.
• SHOULD_CONTINUE - setting this environment variable will force the process to loop forever when it hits it's memory limit. It won't allocate any more. If an eventual death is required, set the MEMORY_LIMIT variable big enough.

Why?

Because testing.