Can I cap a process's RAM usage?

Question

Is it possible to put an artificial limit on the amount of memory a .NET process can use? I'm looking to simulate low-memory situations for testing purposes.

Right now we use a virtual machine for this type of thing. It works, but I'm curious to know if we can figure out a more convenient approach. One that could easily be automated would be ideal.

Edit: As Hans Passant points out, just limiting the amount of virtual memory available to the process won't replace the VM-based tests. The tests are for performance, so I would need to get swapping instead of OutOfMemoryException.

Answer 1

One that could easily be automated would be ideal.

You can use Windows Job Objects to manage this from code. Processes can be associated with a job, and JOBOBJECT_BASIC_LIMIT_INFORMATION allows you to restrict the working set size.

Alteratively, you can call SetProcessWorkingSetSize on the process directly, which will restrict the maximum allowable memory usage for that process.