Types of memory usage

Posted on April 3rd, 2009

When running edgesight reports or looking into server memory usage, the following types of memory are listed:

• Virtual
• Private
• Working set

In looking into a particular issue, I wanted to determine exactly what these different types are and this is what I found.

Virtual

Virtual Bytes is the total size of the non-free pages in a process’ virtual address space. This includes private, image and mapped pages (reserverd and committed pages).

Private

Private Bytes is the total size of the private pages that are not shared.

Working set

The working set of a program is a collection of those pages in its virtual address space that have been recently referenced. It includes both shared and private data. The shared data includes pages that contain all instructions your application executes, including those in your DLLs and the system DLLs. As the working set size increases, memory demand increases.

This is the overall ‘memory usage‘ figure.

Useful links

• sysinternals
• Crayon Metaphor
• msdn (working set description)
• msdn (forum)
• Google groups

Tags: committed, description, edgesight, memory, private, virtual, working set
Filed under Windows 2003 | No Comments »