RE: Virtual memory and page file for performance - Help!

Hi Sharon,

Sorry for letting you wait.

I see that every process still uses the
virtual memory (shown on the Task Manager).
I assume you are talking about "VM Size" column in Task Manager "Processes"
tabpage.

Actually, this column does not mean virtual memory usage of a process, but
it equals "Process: Private Bytes" in performance monitor, which means the
current size, in bytes, of memory that this process has allocated that
cannot be shared with other processes. So this value does not mean that you
are using pagefile.

Also, "Mem Usage" column equals "Process: Working Set" in performance
monitor, which means the working set size of the a process.

Based on my test on a WinXP SP2 machine, after I set the pagefile to "No
paging file" in *Advanced* dialog in "System Properties" dialog and clicked
OK, I rebooted the Windows.
After rebooting, in "Advanced" tabpage, I can see that:
"Total paging file size for all drives: 0MB"

I originally thought that the "PF usage" in "Performance" tabpage of Task
Manager will show the true pagefile usage.

However, in I found that "PF usage" value will not be 0 after rebooting,
but still >90M. By opening some new applications, this value will increase
above 200M. So it seems that pagefile is not disabled at all.

By discussing this issue with our kernel team, I was told that "PF usage"
value actually equals to "Memory\Committed Bytes" in performance monitor,
which is the system-wide commit charge of memory. So this is expected.

In Vista, the performance team has fixed some of the most confusing
terminology in task manager (Mem Usage becames Working Set, VM Size ->
Commit Size etc).
However, "pagefile usage" seems still not be replaced with "commit charge".

Hope this information helps.

Best regards,
Jeffrey Tan
Microsoft Online Community Support
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