Windows System Resource Manager

Windows System Resource Manager
Windows System Resource Manager
Developer(s)	Microsoft Corporation
Operating system	Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008
Available in	Multilingual
License	MS-EULA
Website	Microsoft Windows

Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM) is a component of Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 operating systems that provides resource management and enables the allocation of resources, including processor and memory resources, among multiple applications based on business priorities. It is also available as a downloadable add-on for Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter editions.

WSRM enables users to manage CPU and memory utilization on a per process basis. An administrator sets targets for the amount of hardware resources that running applications or users are allowed to consume. It can allocate resources among multiple applications on a server according to defined policies.

This can be helpful in a corporate environment when, for example, your well-behaved application software has to co-exist with an application that has a memory leak. Without protection such as afforded by the Windows System Resource Manager, your application software will run slower and/or crash, because the misbehaving application software will eventually cause problems that affect every application software that shares its memory space. Thanks to the Windows System Resource Manager, a application software (individually or in groups) can be limited to an isolated subset of hardware resources. As a result of this, the bad effects caused by the memory leak will be limited to that subset. Hardware partitioning can also solve the problem, but it is a far more complex solution.

See also