CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowswinapiprocesspid
Shinjikun
Shinjikun

Reputation: 590

What is the maximum process Id on Windows?

What is the maximum process id I can get by calling DWORD GetProcessId(HANDLE) or DWORD GetCurrentProcessId()? It is not documented on the API's documentation page.

Upvotes: 20

Views: 25462

Answers (2)

Sergey Podobry
Sergey Podobry

Reputation: 7199

According to the Pushing the Limits of Windows: Processes and Threads blog post by Mark Russinovich number of processes is limited only by available memory. So theoretically maximum process id is DWORD_MAX aligned to 4: 0xFFFFFFFC (as pid/tid values are aligned to 4 on Windows).

Upvotes: 19

HerrJoebob
HerrJoebob

Reputation: 2313

I couldn't find an official statement on it but since it's stored and returned as a DWORD you should assume it can use the entire 32-bit range. In practical systems I've never seen a PID large than ~200,000 though - since Windows will reuse PIDs they rarely get larger.

Upvotes: 5

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