Copyright (c) 2025, Mehuge All rights reserved.

Memory Pressure

A Windows utility for applying precise physical memory pressure for development, stress testing, and performance analysis.

What is Memory Pressure?

Memory Pressure is a lightweight yet powerful Windows utility designed for developers, testers, and system analysts who need to simulate specific high-memory conditions. Ever wondered how your application behaves when physical RAM is scarce? Memory Pressure gives you precise control, allowing you to set a target memory usage percentage and watch as it carefully allocates and holds memory to meet that goal.

Beyond stress testing, it's also a comprehensive monitoring tool, providing real-time statistics, data logging, and live graphing capabilities to give you a deep understanding of your system's performance under load.

Key Features

• Precise Memory Targeting: Set a target physical memory usage percentage (e.g., 90%) and the application will allocate memory to reach and maintain that level.

• Real-Time Monitoring: Get an instant, detailed view of your system's memory, including:

  • Total, Used, and Available Physical RAM.

  • Committed Memory (Virtual Memory) and Page File usage.

  • Live-updating list of the Top 10 memory-consuming processes.

• Data Recording & Graphing:

  • Record key performance metrics over time, including physical memory load, page faults, and page file usage.

  • View the data on a live-updating graph to visualize system performance.

  • Save recorded session data to a .csv file for external analysis in tools like Excel.

• Customizable Overlay Mode: Switch to a minimalist, semi-transparent, always-on-top overlay window to monitor key stats while you work or run tests.

• Advanced Settings: A comprehensive settings panel allows you to customize:

  • The sample interval and the number of data points shown on the graph.

  • Which metrics are visible on the graph.

  • Application startup behavior (e.g., start recording or open the graph automatically).

  • Window positions, which are saved between sessions.

Installation

You can download the latest compiled release from the Releases page on the right.

Building from Source

To build the project yourself, you will need:

• Visual Studio 2022 (or later)

• .NET Framework 4.7.2 (or later)

Simply clone the repository and open the .sln file in Visual Studio.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

Screen Shots

Main Window

Memory Usage Graph

Overlay

Acknowledgements

• Coded entirely by Gemini 2.5 Pro prompted by Mehuge
• Artwork by Grok prompted by Mehuge