Simone Murdock said:
Task manager reports 343M of RAM used, but the sum of RAM occupation of
all software is far from this number. I suppose something is missing
(services, libraries,...):
http://www.winntmag.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=3774
|----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Inside Memory Management, Part 2
| Mark Russinovich (Sysinternals)
|
| Working Sets
|
| The biggest effect the Memory Manager has on individual
| applications' performance and on the system is in its allocation
| of physical memory to each active process. The amount of memory
| the Memory Manager assigns to a process is called the working set.
| Every process has a working set.
|
| A special working set, called the system working set, is physical
| memory that belongs to parts of the NT Executive, device drivers,
| and the Cache Manager. [...]
|----------------------------------------------------------------------
is there a more complete memory occupation viewer ? (I have W2000)
Memory architecture is darn complex, working sets of processes only one
side of the cube. In case interested, here are the online copies of the
Reskit W2K chapters on performance monitoring, including discussion on
usage of tools such as System Monitor:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../professional/reskit/en-us/part6/proch27.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../professional/reskit/en-us/part6/proch28.mspx
[OR
http://tinyurl.com/69qfu &
http://tinyurl.com/4a5x3 ]
Now, for more fun instead. The reason I was posting to this thread wasn't
to get involved in a heavy conversation on this subject (truth of that
is risk to get in over my head, or at min talk way too sloppily). I was
posting because tonight I stumbled upon a picture of a shiny new toy.
By the look of this screenshot, it could satisfy your request for a more
detailed overview on the memory usage by processes and system.
<
http://www.k23productions.com/products/process_controller/guide/m-memory.jpg>
Product:
Process Controller v2.0
Product description:
http://www.k23productions.com/products/process_controller/guide/
Download (this is the dl w/o included source code), 900k:
http://www.k23productions.com/e107_files/downloads/process_controller-2.0.zip
OS: 2k/Xp only. :< (9x support is stated to be on the todo...)
The description page is good, so I recommend just loading that up if
curious on this. For offline readers, I'll go ahead and past quote some
parts. The overview, and then the pertinent part -- the description about
what it is showing in the memory usage display it provides.
|----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Process Controller v2.0
|
| Process Controller is a system tray-based utility to monitor and
| control the activity and resources of your system in real time. This
| version is based on the excellent original for BeOS by Georges-
| Edouard Berenger. With it you can:
|
| * See how much processing power and memory is currently being
| used in the system.
| * Quit any application, assuming you have sufficient privileges.
| * View the memory usage of each application.
| * View the activity of each process and thread in real-time.
| * View all windows created by each process.
|
| When run, Process Controller appears in the system tray showing two
| small meters. The left-hand meter shows the current processor
| utilisation and the right-hand meter shows the current memory load.
| You can change the colours used as well as selecting to just display
| processor usage. On dual processor systems, the left-hand meter is
| split into two smaller meters showing processor load for each CPU.
|
| When clicked, Process Controller pops up this menu:
| <
http://www.k23productions.com/products/process_controller/guide/m-main.jpg>
|----------------------------------------------------------------------
|----------------------------------------------------------------------
| The 'Spy Memory Usage' Menu
|
| This menu lets you see how much memory is being used both across the
| system and individually by each process. It should be noted that some
| of these values may be inaccurate due to the way Windows manages
| memory, and limitations in the APIs.
|
| The following shows the level of information Process Controller can
| provide about memory usage:
| <
http://www.k23productions.com/products/process_controller/guide/m-memory.jpg>
|
| The top line (System Resources & Caches) details the total amount of
| Committed memory. That is, the sum of both physical RAM installed in
| the PC and the current paging file size. In this example, 272.4MB of
| memory are currently committed by the operating system (indicated by
| both the blue and purple areas). The PC used in this example has
| 192MB of phyiscal RAM so approximately 80MB is currently paged (stored
| on disk).
|
| The other figure (106.5MB in this example) and indicated by the dark
| blue area is the sum of all the currently running processes'
| working sets (a process' working set is the number of pages it has
| touched recently - this gives an approximate amount of memory the
| process is using). The difference between the two - indicated by just
| the purple area - indicates how much memory is currently used by the
| operating system, which includes the disk cache, cached binaries (so
| applications start faster next time they're run), device drivers,
| and other internal structures.
|
| All the other entries show how much memory each process is using.
| Here, the right-hand value shows the process' virtual size - this
| is the maximum amount of memory the process has access to and is
| represented as a percentage of the total committed memory by the
| light blue bar. The left-hand value show the process' current
| working set, which is a good approximation of how much memory the
| process is currently using; indicated by the dark blue part of
| the bar. [....]
|----------------------------------------------------------------------
And I'll hope it works well...