How can I measure runtime memory requirements of an application on windows platform?

Question

How can I measure runtime memory requirements of an application on windows platform?

Answer 1

I'll assume you mean memory use at a particular point in time, not how much it could potentially ever need.

You can get the information about how much a process is consuming through the windows API, for example GetProcessMemoryInfo. Windows allocates memory in blocks so it may be more accurate than just checking how much memory or heap space is used.

See more details from MSDN

Answer 2

Perfmon.exe will monitor the usage of a process.

Run perfmon.exe, right-click Add counters, pick Process for the Performance Object, then choose things like Virtual Bytes, Working Set, and Page File.

Answer 3

"Memory requirements" are not very well defined, in the first place. WHen you start, your executabel will be linked to many DLLs. Together with the first stack, this forms your initial process. Then, your proces might start extra threads, allocate more memory, and/or memory map some files.

Now Wwindows won't give you real RAM for all these needs. Many DLLs are already loaded for other reasons, so you'll share that RAM. Extra RAM for stacks is allocated when you get soft stackoverflows. Memory mapped files get RAM allocated when those pages fault.

So, one of the important questions is what you really want. You have to answer that first.