Set Windows process (or user) memory limit

Question

Is there any way to set a system wide memory limit a process can use in Windows XP? I have a couple of unstable apps which do work ok for most of the time but can hit a bug which results in eating whole memory in a matter of seconds (or at least I suppose that's it). This results in a hard reset as Windows becomes totally unresponsive and I lose my work.

I would like to be able to do something like the /etc/limits on Linux - setting M90, for instance (to set 90% max memory for a single user to allocate). So the system gets the remaining 10% no matter what.

Answer 1

Use Windows Job Objects. Jobs are like process groups and can limit memory usage and process priority.

Answer 2

Use the Application Verifier (AppVerifier) tool from Microsoft.

In my case I need to simulate memory no longer being available so I did the following in the tool:

1. Added my application
2. Unchecked Basic
3. Checked Low Resource Simulation
   • Changed TimeOut to 120000 - my application will run normally for 2 minutes before anything goes into effect.
   • Changed HeapAlloc to 100 - 100% chance of heap allocation error
   • Set Stacks to true - the stack will not be able to grow any larger
4. Save
5. Start my application

After 2 minutes my program could no longer allocate new memory and I was able to see how everything was handled.

Answer 3

Depending on your applications, it might be easier to limit the memory the language interpreter uses. For example with Java you can set the amount of RAM the JVM will be allocated.

Otherwise it is possible to set it once for each process with the windows API

SetProcessWorkingSetSize Function

Answer 4

No way to do this that I know of, although I'm very curious to read if anyone has a good answer. I have been thinking about adding something like this to one of the apps my company builds, but have found no good way to do it.

The one thing I can think of (although not directly on point) is that I believe you can limit the total memory usage for a COM+ application in Windows. It would require the app to be written to run in COM+, of course, but it's the closest way I know of.

The working set stuff is good (Job Objects also control working sets), but that's not total memory usage, only real memory usage (paged in) at any one time. It may work for what you want, but afaik it doesn't limit total allocated memory.