I have an ultrabook with windows 8. 8GB of physical ram. I run Win7 inside a vmware image, which is assigned 4gb. However I can't make the numbers for physical memory usage add up.
The Win8 machine is doing not very much other than running the VM. Windows itself should have slightly less than 4GB to play in. Yet physical memory usage in task manager is constantly at 75-85% (and occasionally I get dire warnings "you're out of memory" and bluescreens). I can't figure out how that much is being used -- the numbers in task manager don't add up to that much! (either commit charge or working set). How could physical usage be higher than virtual usage?
I've run RamMap and it doesn't really explain things much (and i have no idea if these numbers are normal or indicate a problem). I don't want to have to learn all the gory details of windows memory management; I just want to know why this machine, that should have more than adequate physical RAM, runs out of memory.
I suspect caches/buffers, but CPU usage is low, and this memory doesn't get freed up quickly when it's needed.