How to Find and Kill Running Processes with PowerShell

Heavy hardware resource utilization on end-user machines will lead to reduced productivity by hindering users from getting their job done. In this article, we'll discuss how administrators can identify and kill memory-hogging processes. The following PowerShell script will return the top 5 memory-intensive processes.

1. function Get-CPU
2. {
3.     $CPUPercent = @{
4.         Name = 'CPUPercent'
5.         Expression = {
6.             $TotalSec = (New-TimeSpan -Start $_.StartTime).TotalSeconds
7.             [Math]::Round( ($_.CPU * 100 / $TotalSec), 2)
8.         }
9.     }
10.  
11.     Get-Process |
12.     Select-Object -Property Name, $CPUPercent, Description |
13.     Sort-Object -Property CPUPercent -Descending |
14.     Select-Object -First 5
15. }

 

Alternatively, you can run the following PowerShell script to identify the processes consuming more than 25MB RAM and kill them. 

1. PS C:\> Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.WorkingSet -gt 25000*1024 } | Sort-Object -Property WorkingSet -Descending | Select-Object -First 5
2.  
3. Stop-Process -Name Process_Name -Confirm -PassThru

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