How to keep exited processes in process explorer

Question

Im using the sysinternals process explorer to track the peak working set of processes I'm testing to benchmark them, but they disappear after a few seconds. Is there any way to allow (certain) processes not to disappear, even after they terminate, or are there other ways (than process explorer) to get the peak working set of a process? I'm thinking of something similar to time, but a command that will provide max memory usage.

Answer 1

You can click the Options menu in PE and choose "Difference Highlight Duration". The default is 1 second, which means new processes appear with a green highlight for 1 second, and terminated processes remain visible, with a red highlight, for 1 second after closing. However, you can only raise this value to a maximum of 9 seconds through the UI.

If you need an even longer duration, you can edit the associated registry value at HKCU\SOFTWARE\Sysinternals\Process Explorer. ^{[INSERT STANDARD REGEDIT DISCLAIMER HERE]}
Set the value of HighlightDuration to your desired length of time, in milliseconds. For example, if you want a 30 second highlight duration, you'd set it to 30000 (make sure you put the dialog into decimal mode, lest you get unexpected results!), or for 5 minutes, 300000. Looks like the maximum value is 0xffffffff, or 4.29 million seconds, which I think might be long enough for your needs.

If you need to use the regedit approach, be sure to make the change with PE not running, because it only reads the stored values from the registry upon opening, and only writes changes back to the registry upon exiting, apparently only keeping them in RAM as long as PE is running. So if you make the registry change with PE running, it'll have no effect on the running program, and it'll be overwritten when PE closes.

Answer 2

Resource Monitor (Admin Tools) will keep track of ongoing processes. These will be kept for as long as Resource Monitor is open and you can track the processes you are interested in. This may suit you better.

Answer 3

IF there is only one such process at a time and it lasts long enough or you are fast enough:

doubleclick the entry in the process list; or select it and rightclick / Properties or hit return or ALT+(P)rocess / (P)roperties

This brings up a (modal) subwindow with data about that process. If the process then exits, it is removed from the list in the main window, but the subwindow remains up. The Performance and Performance Graph tabs stop updating, but continue to display the final data (the last update before exit). Performance includes peak private bytes and peak working set, among others.

Answer 4

UPDATE: Read Dan Henderson's answer. It appears a feature has been added to PE that does what is being requested here.

ORIGINAL ANSWER: I don't believe this is a feature of the Process Explorer application.

It's designed to be a task manager, not an ongoing process tracker.

You'll have to find another way to track this information the way you want.