Question

When using the task manager in Windows XP Pro, the amount of RAM that is listed as being used by the individual processes is not adding up to the total memory used (as listed by the total commit on the performance page).

The total sum of all the RAM being used the the processes: 195604 K

The amount in use as listed by performance page and the status bar: 280028 K

1) Why is this?

2) How do I reduce the amount of memory used?

Answer 1

what you see in the status bar is the the total commit charge which represents the current amount of virtual memory used.

The "Mem Usage" column in Task Manager's "Processes" display, however, shows each process's current working set. This is a count of physical memory (RAM) rather than virtual address space.

The total commit charge will always be larger than the sum of these values, as the total includes system-wide allocations such as the paged pool.

Answer 2

Not all the ram is used by processes.

The OS also uses memory, which is not listed under any of the processes