Re: question: high virtual memory usage

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Brian Dessent wrote:

> You're using process explorer, not task manager, and process explorer
> does not interact well with Cygwin for whatever reason.  In this case it
> seems the procexp is computing the VM size wrong.  If you use task
> manager and look at the "VM size" column it will be correct.  You'll
> have to take this up with sysinternals.com, it's not on topic for this
> list.
> 
> The "VM size" column is not a good measure of the actual memory used.
> It does not correlate in any way to real memory, hence virtual.  You
> should consider the "working set" column if you want to know how much
> memory a process is actually using.

Just to clarify:

taskman's "Mem usage" column == procexp's "Working set" column and this
is the amount of memory that is actually being used by the process.

taskman's "VM size" column == procexp's "Private bytes" column and this
is the total amount of code+data that has been assigned to the process,
though not all of it is necessarily in use.

procexp's "virtual size" is simply a representation of the amount of
virutal memory that has been allocated to the process.  Virtual memory
is not real memory and it only means that X number of pages have been
allocated, it says absolutely nothing about the actual memory used by
the process, and you should ignore it completely unless you have a
specific reason to need to know about it.

Brian

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