Working Set – This is the actual amount of memory that the process is using in RAM.

It’s worth noting that applications will always use and reserve a lot of space here, even in ideal scenarios.

Commit – This column lists out the amount of space the application has needed in the paging file.If you are seeing a lot of hard faults, you need to think about upgrading your RAM. Hard Faults – Also called Page Faults, this sounds bad, but it actually means that the application tried to access something in RAM that had been paged out to the paging file.Based on the screenshot above, here is what each of the columns actually means: Over the years, a lot of confusion has left many people with the wrong impression about how Windows manages memory, especially since modern versions of Windows do a much better job.

Something that requires a little more explanation is the terms related to memory usage. Free – This section will usually be pretty small, and Windows will use algorithms to figure out which applications and DLLs you use most, and move them into RAM (which would change that bit of memory from “Free” to “Standby”)īottom line: If the graph is green all the way across most of the time, you probably need to upgrade your RAM or run less things at once.Standby – This section of memory stores commonly used things so they can be accessed without loading from disk, but the lowest priority things will be cleared out to make space for your application.

Modified – This contains pages of memory that have been modified and must be flushed to disk before they get used again.In Use – This is the most important one in the list, because it represents processes, applications, and Windows itself.

Hardware Reserved – This is memory that is reserved for certain drivers and things like system BIOS.

So in an ideal scenario, if you start up an application that requires a function in a common DLL, the main executable and the function might already be sitting in Standby memory and not need to be read from disk at all.

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