Question

I am developing a large program which uses a lot of memory. The program is quite experimental and I add and remove big chunks of code all the time. Sometimes I will add a routine that is rather too memory hungry and the HDD drive will start thrashing and the program (and the whole system) will slow to a snails pace. It can easily take 5 mins to shut it down!

What I would like is a mechanism for avoiding this scenario. Either a run time procedure or even something to be done before running the program, which can say something like “If you run this program there is a risk of HDD thrashing – aborting now to avoid slowing to a snails pace”.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Forgot to mention, my program uses multiple threads.

Answer 1

You could consider using SetProcessWorkingSetSize . This would be useful in debugging, because your app will crash with a fatal exception when it runs out of memory instead of dragging your machine into a thrashing situation.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686234%28VS.85%29.aspx

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