What are the "modified" and "standby" RAM regions in Resource Monitor?

Question

The "Resource Monitor" tool of Windows 7 shows me a typical memory map like in the screen shot above. What are the orange colored modifed and blue colored standby regions in this graphic? What exactly are their functions?

Answer 1

The "Modified" region, logically enough, holds data that has been modified. This can include data that needs to be written to disk. It can also include private mappings that have been modified that don't need to be written to disk.

The "Standby" region contains information that may be used later but can also just be thrown away. It is thus standing by to be used immediately for a more important purpose should one come along. It may include pages that have been pre-zeroed so they can be used without having to fill them with zeroes. It can include pages that hold contents of files on disk that could be used to avoid having to read the files again.

RAMMap can break these regions down for you so you can see what they're really doing.

Answer 2

Standby: Pages of physical ram not actively being used. 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 are essentially cache – it’s better to have infrequently used data kept in RAM “just in case” than pushing it out to disk when the memory isn’t needed for anything else.

Modified: Similar to Standby, but these are pages of physical RAM that have been changed and must be flushed to disk before reusing them.

Source:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/rammap