RAM limiter

I have a QA environment that needs to establish a baseline for our application when running certain processes. The QA machines are fairly beefy (1GB - 4GB of RAM) so I am trying to find some sort of RAM limiter that would limit the amount of RAM actually used to something like 128MB or 256MB. Something one of our clients would have. Any ideas one where I could download or purchase an app like that?

Thanks!

 

Wow, you're looking for the opposite of pretty much everyone else in the computer world! The only RAM limiter software I'm aware of is for the BEos & ZETA OS, as they have a 1GB RAM limit. But even that comes with dire warnings of data loss. If you truly want to emulate your client's machines, you should really mimic their hardware. RAM is cheap.

 

I found that same thing when I went searching. Everyone wants something to get more RAM. Personally, I find thats easy if you buy it. As you say, RAM is definately cheap.

There is a definate problem with emulating 450 clients with anywhere from 5 - 300 workstations. Unfortunately, we do not have 135,000 QA workstations to emulate their hardware. To make this easier to manage we have 5 workstations that we have set as a baseline that every client needs to meet. The problem occurs during the run of certain processes like GL posting, Accounts Payables, Utility Bills, or Payroll runs. They need more RAM to speed up the process. So we have determined that most machines only need 256, machines that run payroll, AP, and GL need 512, and machines that run UB need 1GB.

Right now we have everything running as 512MB and we aren't able to test properly. I was trying to find a way to make it so the QA personnel aren't changing RAM in their test machines but perhaps this isn't possible. It just seems like someone would have come up with an enterprise solution by now that would allow you to do all your testing on one box instead of three (or more) and not have to change out the RAM all the time.

I'll keep searching but from what I have found, you are correct. There is not a program that does what I am looking for.

Thanks

 

I know in DOS you could define the upper & lower Extended RAM addresses, effectively limiting the RAM you could use...haven't heard of anything similar for Windows though...perhaps one of the true Major Geeks can help you out...otherwise yeah, you're stuck with 3 different machines or swapping RAM sticks. Seems to be the way I've always seen it done anyway (multiple machines).

 

Now that I think of it, I havent had much experience with it, VMWare or Virtual Server may be able to do this. I think you can allocate resources for the logicial OS. I guess I'll see if I can prove that out.

 

Is this XP?

Go to msconfig, boot.ini tab, advanced, and change the /maxmem value.

 

Oh, good one! Never knew that existed...

 

I think it was there for 98se and Me as well

 

This is why I'm a minor geek