Xmas said:
I'm trying to track down what's using up all the memory on my Windows XP
box. I have a gig of RAM and the commit charge as reported in taskman
is regularly over 650Mb.
Totting up all the 'mem usage' or 'VM Size' columns used by each
application comes nowhere close to 650Mb.
Where is the rest coming from and how can I track it?
Cheers
xmas
By design Windows will always attempt to find some usage, anything at
all that might conceivable be of some benefit, for every bit of the
installed RAM rather than just leaving it sitting there doing nothing.
So Windows will use available RAM to create a large cache of recently
used disk data, retain the code from recently closed applications in
memory, and so forth. And whenever some better use comes along for
any of this RAM it will instantaneously drop the more trivial usages
so as to free up whatever is now required.
Unused memory should perhaps be referred to as "useless memory"
because that is what it actually is - memory for which Windows has so
far been totally unable to find any potentially beneficial use for.
Hope this explains the situation.
Good luck
Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2006)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca
Syberfix Remote Computer Repair
"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."
