Is your computer running slow, battery running out quickly?

If your computer is running hot or battery running out quickly then it is most likely due to some application or process consuming high CPU or memory. If you keep running applications for a long time, for example, Outlook, then it continues to grow in memory consumption and does not free up memory efficiently. As a result, your computer runs out of physical memory and other applications run slower. Sometimes Outlook, browser, image editing applications or some other application start taking full CPU as they get into some heavy internal processing and make your CPU hot and other applications perform slower.

My new CPUAlert is an application that monitors CPU and memory consumption of applications and alerts you if some application is consistently taking high CPU or high memory. It not only saves your CPU and Battery’s lifetime but also makes your computer run smooth and let your active applications run as fast as they can be.

While it is running, if some process is consuming more than 200 MB memory, it will show you an alert:

Here you can see my Outlook is taking 244 MB of physical RAM.

You can either postpone the alert for 5 mins (just press ESC), or ignore the process permanently so that you no longer receive alert for the process anymore, or you can close it and reclaim memory.

The handy feature is “Restart” which closes the application and starts again. This generally frees up memory that clogs up in the process.

Same alert will come if some process is consuming more than 30% CPU for over 5 mins.

You can configure all these settings like what’s the tolerable limit for CPU and memory, how frequently to show alert, how long to wait before closing application etc by right clicking on the Task bar icon and choosing Settings.

Source code of the project is available at:

http://code.google.com/p/cpualert/

The installer can also be downloaded from there.

Warning: The code is not in a good shape. I was frustrated at some process taking high CPU and memory and I wrote this app within hours to get the job done for me.

If you like the application, spread the word!