Is there any way of throttling CPU/Memory of a process?

The platform SDK used to come with stress tools for doing just this back in the good old days (STRESS.EXE, CPUSTRESS.EXE in the SDK), but they might still be there (check your platform SDK and/or Visual Studio installation for these two files -- unfortunately I have niether the PSDK nor VS installed on the machine I'm typing from.)

Other tools:

  • memory: performance & reliability (e.g. handling failed memory allocation): can use EatMem
  • CPU: performance & reliability (e.g. race conditions): can use CPU Burn, Prime95, etc
  • handles (GDI, User): reliability (e.g. handling failed GDI resource allocation): ??? may have to write your own, but running out of GDI handles (buggy GTK apps would usually eat them all away until all other apps on the system would start falling dead like flies) is a real test for any Windows app
  • disk: performance & reliability (e.g. handling disk full): DiskFiller, etc.

AppVerifier has a low-resource simulation feature.

You could also try setting the priority of your process to be very low.


You can run MemAlloc to chew up RAM, possibly a few copies at once.


I found a related question:

Set Windows process (or user) memory limit

The accepted answer for the question has a link to the Windows API's SetProcessWorkingSetSize, so it's not exactly a tool that can limit the amount of memory that a process can use.

In terms of changing the amount of CPU resources a process can use, if you don't mind the granularity of per-core limiting of resources, Task Manager can change the processor affinity of a process.

In Task Manager, right-click a process and select "Set Affinity...", then select the processor cores that the process can be assigned to.

If the development machine has many cores but the user machine only has one, then, rather than allowing the process to run on all the available cores, set the process' processor affinity to only one core.