system resources

[Jblake00]

Is there a way to tell how much resoures a program uses to run?

I mean programatically. I now I can moniter the resources my pc is using. But I am curious about how to tell about the program that is running only not about all the rest of the window operating system components and things such as nortons antivirus and such... In another words I guess I am trying to ask on the back of the box, when you buy a game or app, it will say system requirements are such and such... Well how is that determined?

[PlausiblyDamp]

As an external tool

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml

is very good - new version supports .Net features like garbage collections run, classes / assemblies loaded etc. These can give some good idea of demand on the system.

If you are running XP/ Win2K / NT4.0 you also have the System monitor which can target quite specific areas of cpu / mem /disk usage. These same counters can be accessed programatically through the System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter class.

As to how to determine the requirements themselves running the app on a low memory / slow cpu system and seeing when it stops being usable - something like VMWare or MS Virtual PC can help in this case as you can create a virtual pc and artifically limit RAM available.