However, since this involves I/O, it is not considered to be “Available” memory. Therefore it can be written to disk at any time (not to the page file, but to its original file location) and reused. No process has specifically asked for this data to be in memory, it is merely there as a consequence of caching. That’s because Cached includes cache pages on both the “standby list” and what is called the “modified list.” Cache pages on the modified list have been altered in memory.
And yet in the screenshot above you can see that it is larger than the Available area of memory. This number does not include the Free portion of memory. Specifically, it includes pages on what is called the “standby list.” These are pages holding cached data which can be discarded, allowing the page to be zeroed and given to an application to use.Ĭached - Here things get a little more confusing. It wholly includes the Free number, but also includes most of the Cached number. It’s not being used and it contains nothing but 0s.Īvailable - This numbers includes all physical memory which is immediately available for use by applications. Here’s a description of the four labels, from the bottom:įree - This one is quite simple. – That leaves 29% of memory “available”, despite the indication that only 16MB of physical memory is totally “free.” – 71% of that physical memory is currently in use by applications and the system. – We are looking at a machine with 4GB of physical memory installed. In Windows 7, the folks building the Task Manager performance tab tried to make it a little easier to understand the usage of physical memory on your system. But first, let’s look at a simple way to measure the amount of physical memory in use on your system. I’ll tackle a prime example of this, the “commit” indicator, later in this post. The labels on various readouts in Task Manager, among other places, were often either poorly named or simply misunderstood.
Historically, measuring the amount of memory in use by a Windows system has been a somewhat confusing endeavor.
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