Windows is a complex operating system that constantly manages a variety of processes to keep your computer running smoothly.
One of the crucial aspects of this management is the way the operating system allocates RAM. If you are someone who wants to know how RAM is allocated in Windows, then you can make use of RAM folder.
RAMMap is a diagnostic tool developed by Microsoft's Sysinternals. RAMMap is intended for advanced users, system administrators, and IT professionals who want to gain an in-depth understanding of how Windows manages physical memory.
Gain insight into Windows Memory usage with RAMMap
RAMMap analyzes physical memory and shows you different pools of memory going into it, how much memory is being used by drivers, what portion of memory is currently unallocated, etc. Freeing up memory can also help with that.
To begin download your RAMMap to your computer. You can open the app without installing it further.
Once you open it, you will immediately see different tabs. These are the next tabs.
- Use Counts: Shows you the memory usage by memory type and a list of paging. Paging is used to manage memory usage efficiently. Read more about paging.
- Processes: Here you can see the working set sizes of different processes.
- Process summary: Information about the priority sizes for standby lists.
- Physical pages: Per-page usage for all physical memory.
- Physical Ranges: Exact addresses of the physical memory.
- File summary: An overview of files in RAM.
- File details: Detailed view of the physical pages assigned to a specific file.
Real time monitoring
A useful part of RAMMap is that it can be used to monitor memory in real-time. This is useful, for example, when monitoring processes or performing memory-intensive tasks. For example, this allows you to assess which app or process is consuming a lot of memory on your computer.
Take snapshot
To analyze the memory you can save a snapshot via RAMMap. You can then later analyze this snapshot or compare it with another recording. This allows you to analyze any RAM problems or anomalies later.
Clear memory categories
The memory management in Windows divides RAM into different pools and lists depending on how and where it is used. One of these lists is the standby list. The standby list contains pages of memory that were previously allocated to a process and recently freed. The data on these pages is still retained in memory and not written to disk.
In some situations, such as when running certain benchmarks or troubleshooting memory performance issues, you may want to clear standby memory to get a "clean slate." This is where the “Empty Standby List” can be useful.
When you choose this option, the pages in the standby list are deleted and marked as free, making the RAM they were occupying available for other processes. This is a simple way to immediately free up RAM.
This option is primarily a tool for advanced users and professionals who have specific reasons for doing this. Under normal circumstances, Windows is perfectly capable of managing the memory itself.
I hope to have informed you with this. Thank you for reading!
Also read: What type of RAM is in my Windows computer?