Although I now use a relatively more powerful computer compared to what I had a decade ago, I still sometimes get very annoyed when some applications hog up a large portion of the system memory. Firefox is one of such Windows applications. For some reason the memory consumption in Firefox keeps going up with time unless you restart it. This is not a big problem on modern computer with large memory banks, but if you have an older computer, then your computer may become sluggish. If you want to keep the memory consumption of programs in check, then you can use the free program Process Piglet. It monitors programs and alerts you when they unusually “pig out” on the available memory, giving you options to terminate or restart them.
You can get the Process Piglet from the Donation Coder website. The program is available as a portable application. You can extract the contents of the downloaded archive and run ProcessPiglet.exe from there. When you run it, it sits in the notification area of Windows and monitors the memory usage by various programs. You can right-click on the Process Piglet and choose to open its settings or the restore form.
If you choose the Restore Form, a small window with a list of top memory consumer processes is displayed. You can right-click on any of the programs in the list and choose to terminate them or restart them. You can also search about that program online through the right-click context menu.
In the settings window, you can define the criteria of determining the top memory consumers. You can exclude some programs that you do not want to be monitored. In the General section, you can decide to make it run every time Windows starts, choose alert sound and alert time etc. You can also view a log of all the alert events.
When the memory consumption of a process suddenly goes up, it displays an alert popup window near the bottom-right corner of your screen. The alert popup shows the name of the process and the rise in its memory usage. You can also forcefully restart the application in an attempt to reduce its memory consumption.
Conclusion: The Process Piglet is a freeware application that can help your monitor the memory usage by different processes in your Windows PC. It can alert you when the processes unusually “pig out” on the available memory, giving you options to terminate or restart them.
You can download Process Piglet from http://www.donationcoder.com/.