ITT: we see how many programs we can run before our system starts becoming unusably slow.

mine:

I wouldn't even know where I would find 1039 processes on my computer.

I currently have 49 processes running....... I turned on everything that I knew of.

I used a batch file to run notepad.exe 1000 times. I normally only have 39 running.

Could you tell me how to do that? I want to know how many my computer can handle.

You can try just a regular fork bomb, they're fairly simple. Just time how long it takes your computer to memory overflow.



Paste that into notepad, and save it as fork.bat

Be sure it doesn't save as fork.bat.txt, because then it's not going to work.

gracias.

By the way, I don't know why you would want to forkbomb your computer.

well thank you for telling me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb

wiki ftw

I know this is pedantic, but a fork bomb doesn't cause problems because memory is used up; it causes problems because the OS's process table becomes filled (not because of memory constraints, just because the process table only holds a finite number of processes). I think Windows uses a shared, copy-on-write memory model (I know Unix/Linux/Mac OS X does), so 1 notebook.exe process uses roughly the same amount of memory as 1,000,000.

</systems-programmer>

Except the thousand I had running used 70% of my memory, while with only one open I was using 20% of my memory.

Perhaps Windows' copy-on-write mechanism is more conservative than that of Unix and Linux. At any rate, a fork bomb works by filling up the process table (which maps a process to its virtual memory space), and not by using up RAM itself.

I suppose that could be it.