“How much memory is your process using?” — I bet you were asked that question, or asked it yourself, more times than you can remember. But what do you really mean by
memory?
I never thought it would be hard to find a definitive resource for what the various memory usage counters mean for a Windows process. But try it: Google
“Windows Task Manager memory columns” and you’ll see confusing, conflicting, inconsistent, unclear explanations of what the different metrics represent. If we can’t even agree on what “working set” or “commit size” means, how can we ever monitor our Windows applications successfully?
First, we will need a sample application that will allocate various kinds of memory for our experiments. I’ve written one for this blog post: it is simply called
Memory. You can find it on
GitHub. Currently, it supports multiple kinds of allocations: reserve, commit, shareable memory, and more. ....... (continue)
