Process list memory usage vastly different than Resource Monitor

Aelius33 · September 30, 2014

Hi, I keep frequent track of my system's performance and just today I noticed something extremely unusual for me. I have 12GB of RAM, and doing the normal desktop work I ordinarily do tends to use about 4GB of memory with a bit of shared/cached memory and tons of free memory left over.

However, as you can see in this screenshot, not only is my memory usage much higher than it normally is, but the graphical bar at the bottom is showing vastly more memory usage than you can possibly get by adding up any of the columns in the process list above it.

As you can see, try as hard as you want, you simply cannot get anywhere even remotely close to 6239MB of in use memory, let alone the additional 5279MB of standby/cached memory.

If there was something taking up all my memory, then fine, I'd simply close the process. But there is no such process. Something is taking up all of my memory, and it's frightening that it's seemingly invisible.

Anyone have any idea what's going on?

AlwaysFSX · September 30, 2014

This looks like it adds up actually?

Aelius33 · September 30, 2014

This looks like it adds up actually?

No, none of the columns add up to anything more than 3.0-3.5 GB, and there's 11GB in use + shared, and 6.2GB in use alone.

AlwaysFSX · September 30, 2014

No, none of the columns add up to anything more than 3.0-3.5 GB, and there's 11GB in use + shared, and 6.2GB in use alone.

Maybe commit and working memory need to be added together..? That's the only way I can see it adding up and making sense.

Aelius33 · September 30, 2014

Using the RamMap program, I found out that about half of my "in use" memory is actually page pooled (a.k.a. paged kernel memory), which is not shareable. You can see this value by going to the Performance tab of the Task Manager and looking at "Paged" under the bottom left "Kernel Memory" section.

I tried Googling around to figure out what it does, what causes it to be so high, whether a high value is a problem, or whether any of that memory gets surrendered to another process that needs it, but I couldn't get an explanation.