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RE: question: high virtual memory usage


----Original Message----
>From: Brian Dessent
>Sent: 14 June 2005 03:23

> Procexp's "virtual size" column seems to be a meaningless number that
> procexp somehow arrives at.

  It's the amount of reserved-but-not-yert-committed memory.

>  It's not just cygwin processes that it
> seems to come up with outragiously high values for.  On my system there
> is a svchost.exe process (part of the operating system) that uses
> 10,192KB working set and 10,400KB private bytes, but process explorer
> lists its "virtual size" as 143,260KB.  Clearly this process is not
> using anywhere near 143MB of RAM.  I really think you should ignore this
> column, it does not say anything useful.  If I add up the total sizes of
> all the values of this column on my system, I get something like 7GB,
> and I only have 1GB of ram and 512MB of swap.

  It tells you the total amount of memory space out of the processes entire
virtual 2Gb address space that has been allocated; that is, the amount of
the memory map that has been laid out, but not yet necessarily accessed or
used; reserved pages require no significant overhead until they are actually
used and (real or virtual-paged) memory has to be assigned to them.



    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....


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