Very Brief Notes on Windows Memory etc

I have no time nowadays to update this blog but I wanted to dump these notes I made for myself today. Just so the blog has some update and I know I can find these notes here again when needed.

This is on the various types of memory etc in Windows (and other OSes in general). I was reading up on this in the context of Memory Mapped Files.

Virtual Memory

  • Amount of memory the OS can access. Not related to the physical memory. It is only related to processor and OS – is it 32-bit or 64-bit.
  • 32-bit means 2^32 = 4GB; 64-bit means 2^64 = a lot! :)
  • On a default install of 32-bit Windows kernel reserves 2GB for itself and applications can use the balance 2GB. Each application gets 2GB. Coz it doesn’t really exist and is not limited by the physical memory in the machine. The OS just lies to the applications that they have 2GB of virtual memory for themselves.

Physical Memory

  • This is physical. But not limited to the RAM modules. It is RAM modules plus paging file/ disk.

Committed Memory

  • When a virtual memory page is touched (read/ write/ committed) it becomes “real” – i.e. put into Physical Memory. This is Committed Memory. It is a mix of RAM modules and disk.

Commit Limit

  • The total amount of Committed Memory is obviously limited by your Physical Memory – i.e. the RAM modules plus disk space. This is the Commit Limit.

Working Set

  • Set of virtual memory pages that are committed and fully belong to that process.
  • These are memory pages that exist. They are backed by Physical Memory (RAM plus paging files). They are real, not virtual.
  • So a working set can be thought of as the subset of a processes Virtual Memory space that is valid; i.e. can be referenced without a page fault.
    • Page fault means when the process requests for a virtual page and that is not in the Physical Memory, and so has to be loaded from disk (not page file even), the OS will put that process on hold and do this behind the scene. Obviously this causes a performance impact so you want to avoid page faults. Again note: this is not RAM to page file fault; this is Physical Memory to disk fault. Former is “soft” page fault; latter is “hard” page fault.
    • Hard faults are bad and tied to insufficient RAM.

Life cycle of a Page

  • Pages in Working Set -> Modified Pages -> Standby Pages -> Free Pages -> Zeroed pages.
  • All of these are still in Physical RAM, just different lists on the way out.

From http://stackoverflow.com/a/22174816:

Memory can be reserved, committed, first accessed, and be part of the working set. When memory is reserved, a portion of address space is set aside, nothing else happens.

When memory is committed, the operating system guarantees that the corresponding pages could in principle exist either in physical RAM or on the page file. In other words, it counts toward its hard limit of total available pages on the system, and it formally creates pages. That is, it creates pages and pretends that they exist (when in reality they don’t exist yet).

When memory is accessed for the first time, the pages that formally exist are created so they truly exist. Either a zero page is supplied to the process, or data is read into a page from a mapping. The page is moved into the working set of the process (but will not necessarily remain in there forever).

Memory Mapped Files

Windows (and other OSes) have a feature called memory mapped files.

Typically your files are on a physical disk and there’s an I/O cost involved in using them. To improve performance what Windows can do is map a part of the virtual memory allocated to a process to the file(s) on disk.

This doesn’t copy the entire file(s) into RAM, but a part of the virtual memory address range allocated to the process is set aside as mapping to these files on disk. When the process tries to read/ write these files, the parts that are read/ written get copied into the virtual memory. The changes happen in virtual memory, and the process continues to access the data via virtual memory (for better performance) and behind the scenes the data is read/ written to disk if needed. This is what is known as memory mapped files.

My understanding is that even though I say “virtual memory” above, it is actually restricted to the Physical RAM and does not include page files (coz obviously there’s no advantage to using page files instead of the location where the file already is). So memory mapped files are mapped to Physical RAM. Memory mapped files are commonly used by Windows with binary images (EXE & DLL files).

In Task Manager the “Memory (Private Working Set)” column does not show memory mapped files. For this look to the “Commit Size” column.

Also, use tools like RAMMap (from SysInternals) or Performance Monitor.

More info