Monitor High RAM Usage with ‘Process Piglet’

With today’s modern machines mostly equipped with high capacity RAM and multi-core processors, issues created by processes gobbling up vast amounts of the system’s resources have largely been negated. However, for those who run machines with lower resource specs, in this case specifically RAM, here’s a great little program called Process Piglet which monitors running processes for high memory usage.

Even those users running machines with sufficient or ample RAM will find this little application useful for identifying memory leaks and over enthusiastic processes.

Process Piglet has been developed by “Mouser” over at DonationCoder and is available in both installer and portable versions. I, of course, elected for the portable version.

Process Piglet – Download and usage

Download is a 1.29 MB zip folder extracting to 2.94MB (Windows 7 64-bit). As one would expect, coming from such a reputable source, it scans 100% clean through Virus Total.

Running Process Piglet is simply a matter of double clicking the extracted executable. Process Piglet does not include any interface as such, the software places an icon in the system tray which provides access to its limited options via a right click menu:

Settings, which are available via “Edit Options” in the right click menu, are also pretty straightforward. There aren’t too many variables to worry about with this type of software, and the defaults are best suited for most users anyway.

Because Process Piglet is only concerned with high RAM usage, it ignores any processes under 50 MB RAM by default and monitors only those above that number. This parameter can be adjusted by the user of course:

It is possible to also add processes into an exclusions list so they will be ignored by Process Piglet altogether.

Process Piglet picks up each new application as it’s opened, monitors RAM usage for around 30 seconds to establish a baseline, and then adds it to an inventory of all running processes which meet the criteria. The full list can be accessed at any time simply by double clicking Process Piglet’s system tray icon:

Right clicking on any item in the list will bring up a menu which includes an online search option to help identify unknown processes:

Once up and running, every time a process starts consuming more RAM than normal, Process Piglet will pop up an alert. When such an alert is shown you may choose to ignore it – you will be alerted again later if memory usage continues to increase – or you can use Process Piglet to forcibly terminate and restart the application.

**Please be careful with the force restart feature, utilizing it under certain conditions may impact negatively – e.g. it is not advisable to forcefully restart a process which is using memory to store unsaved data or is actively processing.

Bottom Line

Process Piglet is an unobtrusive little program that can be useful for identifying memory leaks, or just to keep an eye on processes and their memory usage,  all without the need for constant user monitoring. Plus it’s available in a portable version too.

• View more information regarding Process Piglet and its features and download direct from the developer here: Process Piglet Home Page

Portable Version: the following screenshot indicates the link to download the portable version, situated top left of the home page: