MemAlloc — Memory Stress Test

MemAlloc asks Windows for any amount of RAM you specify — gigabytes more than you have installed, if you want — and shows in real time how Windows reacts: page-file growth, swap activity, available memory crashing toward zero.

What it does

You enter a size in megabytes. The program requests that much memory from Windows in 1 MB chunks. You can watch the system resources panel in real time as the allocation grows: total RAM, available RAM, total page file, available page file, memory load percentage, total and available virtual memory — all refreshing every second.

What it's good for

• Benchmarking how your system handles heavy memory load
• Simulating the load of running several big applications at once
• Determining real memory requirements for specific software
• Testing whether you have a failing RAM module
• Testing how other programs behave when Windows is starved for memory
• Comparing how different Windows versions handle memory pressure
• Measuring how fast the OS recovers when the load is released

The swap trick

Ask MemAlloc to allocate 8 GB on a machine with 4 GB of RAM. It works. Windows quietly pages other applications out to disk to free memory for your request — that's swapping. The program lets you see this in action: physical RAM bottoms out while page-file usage climbs. Useful for understanding why your machine slows to a crawl during heavy multitasking.

Features

• Allocate any size of RAM — up to and beyond physical memory
• Live real-time resource panel (RAM, page file, virtual memory, load %)
• 1 MB allocation chunks for fine-grained control
• Release memory instantly to test OS recovery
• Portable single executable

System requirements

• Windows 7, 8, 10, 11 (older versions back to Windows NT are supported)
• The more RAM you have, the more interesting the test
• Under 1 MB of disk space for the tool itself