How to limit the RAM consumed by Windows processes

We Windows users have all suffered pufferfish process syndrome, when some application running in the background consumes so many resources that it eats up practically all your available RAM and drowns the computation capacity of the operating system. Given that it’s often complicated to find the cause of this problem, it might be a good idea to limit the maximum memory a process can make use of. Battle Encoder Shirase (BES for us cool kids) is a tool that does exactly that.

The program is completely free and completely unofficial, meaning its use is best left to those who really know what they’re doing, although there’s no rocket science in how it works: when it starts you just have to select the process you want to limit from among a list of all those active at that moment.

After marking it, you can specify the maximum amount of memory you want it to consume. To do so, click the Control button after activating the limit. A sliding bar lets you choose the reduction with respect to the full amount of available memory. In other words, if you set it to -20%, the max memory consumption will be 80% of available RAM. The only limit on this process is that you can only limit up to three processes at the same time if you want to preserve the stability of your system.

The only factor to keep in mind is that the limits will only remain in effect while the application is open and running in the background. That said, before closing the program you should remove all the imposed limits by clicking the ‘Unlimit All’ button. There are some additional options like the possibility to freeze a process until specified otherwise or to give priority to one activity over others, although we repeat: best to leave those features to people who know what they’re doing.