hello

i think it is useful to see directly the physical memory rather than virtual memory.

what can i do to have this information in the module?
thanks

Physical memory usage is absolutely meaningless. The OS will use (or try to) 100% of the physical memory at all times not only for applications but also for various caches, etc...

What really matters is virtual memory usage.

True. Which is one of the (many) reasons why those $19.95 memory manager defraggers/optimisers etc are a waste of money.

All programs will try to grab whatever they can to get their task done, Windows manages memory most efficiently by ensuring that as close to 100% of the physical memory is being put to a useful purpose.

Memory that isn't being used for anything is memory that is wasted.

All programs can do is to go to the windows memory manager with cap in hand and make a request for however much memory each program needs. Windows plays the traffic cop and will do what it can to ensure resources are available when needed.

Even these "memory optimisers" cannot bypass the Windows Memory Traffic Cop - and whatever the optimisers change would only be reversed or ignored once another request comes to use that memory.

i'm sorry but in my system (and a lot of people) the use of physical memory never or rarely reaches the 100%.

i use xp and have 512mb of physical memory.
(i'm using 385mb during writing this post)

a computer with a constant use of 100% physical memory always swaps, and performances are bad.

be honest the use of your system is reaching really 100% of physical memory during the reading of this post?
i don't think so.

i would simply know how much memory my programs use.
when i close a program it liberates space in the physical memory and i can see it, but when i open a program it uses space in the physical memory.
it is useful to see it, "in live".

when you say "try to use 100%" it is exactly that which is interesting.
we can see the variation according to opened programs.

now i want to understand what 's the interest to see the use of virtual memory?

I suggest you do some reading about how Operating Systems use physical and virtual memory.

Let me give you just another example on how monitoring physical memory usage is a pointless exercise:

Imagine you have 1 GB of RAM, and your programs are using 750 MB of it (which means you have 250 MB free).

Now you decide to copy a large file from one hard disk to another. What happens then is that Windows will allocate most of the remaining 250 MB of RAM for the disk cache (i.e. the file is NOT copied directly from disk to disk, it goes like this, in chunks: Disk A -> Memory -> Disk B).

So, suddenly your free physical memory goes from 250 MB to 0 MB just because you decided to copy a large file.

Although you now have essentially no physical memory available, your system will still not crash, because you have plenty of virtual memory available. When required, Windows will then reclaim some physical memory from the disk cache (thus decreasing its size) in order to give it to applications and so on.

Again, this is just a simple example of why monitoring physical memory is useless.

More: the total space used by an application in memory is NOT the amount of physical memory used by it, BUT rather the amount of page file (swap file) memory used + amount of physical memory used. Since virtual memory size = (page file size + physical memory size), that is what you should be monitoring. Otherwise you just get meaningless values.

it is exactly what i want to monitor, since it never reaches or very rarely 100% .


an other thing:
you want a proof that the virtual memory doesn't start to be used only when the physical memory is full?
ok so please look at the use of your physical and virtual memory.
they are both used, aren't they?
nevertheless your physical memory is not used at 100%
you can't contest it since you see it by yourself on your system.


please don't read the precedent paragraph without doing the test, do the test.

I never said that, and the fact that virtual memory is used immediately is actually one more reason for you to understand why monitoring physical memory alone is meaningless.

Anyway, I'm obviously not going to continue this argument forever as it is not my job to educate you, and you're free to believe what you want - but I'll leave you with THIS article from Microsoft itself about RAM, Virtual Memory, Pagefile and all that stuff...