These are usually pages that have been freed by an existing process. Free: Free pages are free to be used but have some type of “dirty” data in them so they must be zeroed for security reasons before given to a user process.Zeroed: Pages that have been zeroed out and are ready to be used – they can be quickly allocated for new physical memory allocations.Transition: Pages that are in transition between any of the other categories.Modified no write: Similar to modified pages but have been marked not to write out to disk.Modified: Similar to Standby, but these are pages of physical RAM that have been changed and must be flushed to disk before reusing them.These are still left in physical RAM but will be repurposed first by the memory manager (either returned to the active list or zeroed out and reused) if something needs physical ram for active pages. Standby: Pages of physical RAM not actively being used.Active: Pages of physical RAM in active use by the specified category (usually a process working set or the system working set).Glossary and Guide to the column and row headings Stages of memory Launch RAMMap to have it take a snapshot of memory usage.First, when looking in task manager and at the memory usage by processes to view memory usage, ensure you also look in the Memory box on the performance tab – the amount of cached, paged pool, and non-paged pool memory usage.How do we find or account where that mystery memory is being used? RAMMap from Sysinternals is the tool needed for the job. When large amount of RAM is being used by not accounted for in task manager or resource manager. Large chunk of RAM being used but you cannot see where or by what.When you cannot reconcile the amount of RAM being used with task manager, resource monitor, or perfmon collection.If you already determined the process consuming memory, check out my previous blog post: Memory Leaks in a Process This blog addresses how to troubleshoot unaccounted memory usage or leak to include identifying and data collection. My name is Jeffrey Worline, and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer on the Windows Performance Team at Microsoft.

Perfmon memory usage