I have been feeling this way for a while, looking at task manager mentally ballparking how much physical memory should be in use, and noticing a large disparity. I finally got around to measuring it. Taking the results of tasklist and adding, gave about 3.87 GB. Task manager told me I was using 4.6 GB of memory. This seems like a large disparity. Where did it go?
EDIT: So its clear, it is not going to prefetch. It has also been suggested that its part of the OS, but not part of any of the system processes. If this is true, please find a way to get the OS to tell me how much memory is getting used. Since I want to find out where the memory went, asking me to look at the difference does nothing for me.
EDIT 2: It is not the following:
- The kernel
- The cache
- Hardware reserved memory
Picture of resources taken up. Not quite sure what it will do but…
Solution:
I suggest downloading the Sysinternals Suite from Microsoft. It includes several utilities that will give you more information than Task Manager does. Take a look at the Process Explorer, RAMMap, VMMap, and Process Monitor utilities. To get the most information from them, you may need to do some configuration to change what info is displayed.
Also, since you’re interested in Windows memory, here is a series of blog posts from Mark Russinovich, one of the Sysinternals developer/founder. It will help make sense of the info the utilities provide.