Physical and virtual memory

[gehand]

Hi,

I'm trying to evaluate the memory usage of an application and so am tracking the Mem Usage and VM Size columns in the windows Task Manager. However, what I've noticed is that once both the physical memory and virtual memory are exhausted, physical memory usage drops sharply while virtual memory stays at around its previous level but the application keeps running. So I'm guessing that the OS is swapping memory into some location other than virtual memory.

Is my theory correct? If so, would anyone know how I would track the usage of this other memory resource?

FYI, I'm doing my testing on a notebook with a Centrino 1.5Ghz processor and 496MB RAM running on Windows XP Professional

Cheers,
Gehan

[vidster]

If i'm not mistaken, XP will take as much disk space as it needs to use as virtual memory, unless you set it at a certain level.

By default XP does quite a good job with virtual memory.