Virtual Memory Usage

Even if your system exceeds the minimum physical memory requirements for the operating system, you might face situations in which you do not have enough physical memory. For example, if you run several memory-intensive applications or if several users share your computer, the available physical memory of your system could be consumed, affecting your system's performance.

To see how much virtual memory your Windows 2000 Professional–based computer uses, start all applications and use Task Manager to see the Peak Commit Charge value. This value appears in the Commit Charge box on the Performance tab. Commit charge is the number of pages reserved for virtual memory that are backed by the paging file.

Peak committed memory is the highest amount of virtual memory (in bytes) that has been committed over this sample. To be committed, these bytes must either have a corresponding amount of storage available on disk or in main memory. Compare this value against the size of the paging file to determine if the paging file is sized appropriately.

On a computer running Windows 2000 Server, in addition to total committed memory, you need to consider the number of users sharing a system and the number of files they open to determine memory requirements for your workload.

Under Computer Management, use Shared Folders under System Tools to view this information.

For information about additional recommendations pertaining to memory on server computers, see "Monitoring Network Performance" in this book.

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