# Checking How Much Memory a Program Uses

Category: Geeks r Us

## Post 1 by Eleni21 (I have proven to myself and the world that I need mental help) on Friday, 14-Aug-2009 19:09:00

I'm sure that I'll learn more about how this works when I get up off my lazy ass and open the book on multitasking but here's what I understand. All programs run sylmultaniously and are loaded via a task manager. It could be the built-in one in DR-DOS or even an after-market one like Deskview. In any case, when you switch programs, they're swapped in and out of memory or onto/off of a swap disk. Now, even with memory extenders etc, I'm assuming that it still matters how much memory these programs take up. If you have say three memory-eaters and then try to add two other programs, I'd imagine the system would crash or not work. What I don't know is what kind of memory is used and does it matter how much you have on the machine at a certain point or is it always a finite amount set by the os? In any case, is there a way for me to check the amount of memory a program uses either when it's loaded into the task manager or before hand? Thanks.

## Post 2 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Saturday, 15-Aug-2009 10:41:46

Under windows, you can go under task manager>processes tab, and see how much memory is being used, and the CPU power its using.

## Post 3 by Eleni21 (I have proven to myself and the world that I need mental help) on Saturday, 15-Aug-2009 10:46:54

As I hinted at in my post, I'm not using Windows. I'm using dos. However, since these programs do run from the task manager that's built-in, I'll have to check the menu options. Maybe, there's one that'll tell me about the memory usage. Thanks for the tip. If not, I can try the mem command. But I'm not sure if that'll tell me only how much memory's in the machine or if it'll tell me about each program being used.