Critical Process Died At Start Up Nothing Thus Far Seems To Fix

Saturday, December 14, 2019

WMI Virtual Memory Usage



Posted Today, 12:19 PM
Gordefving, on 14 Dec 2019 - 08:29 AM, said:
For the past few days all of the browsers have been crashing (allegedly low memory which makes no sense considering the number of free gigs that I did have available),...

The "low memory" message could be referring to virtual memory and not to physical memory (RAM).

Virtual memory is the usage of the page file for memory instead of using physical RAM. Some apps (like Notepad, for example) writes directly to the page file (virtual memory) instead of writing to physical RAM. Sysinternals Process Monitor from Microsoft does the same thing.

With virtual memory, the system writes to and reads from the page file (c:\pagefile.sys) instead of RAM, making the system very, very slow.

You can run this Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) app to check on your peak and current virtual memory usage - (I wrote the app, so it is safe) - 


Download and save to Desktop or Documents. RIGHT-click on the EXE, select "Run as Administrator". Upon completion, a Notepad will open (it may be located in the Taskbar). Scroll to the end of the file and you'll see this - 
AllocatedBaseSize=8704
Caption=C:\pagefile.sys
CurrentUsage=1311
Description=C:\pagefile.sys
InstallDate=20131220133842.488186-300
Name=C:\pagefile.sys
PeakUsage=1331
Status=
TempPageFile=FALSE

The two important numbers - 
1. CurrentUsage=1311 = I am currently using 1,311 MB (1.3 GB) of virtual memory (I have about 2 dozen Notepads open due to my BSOD Dump Processing App
2. PeakUsage=1331 = My peak virtual memory usage since the last system re-boot (~1.33 GB virtual memory) - again, likely due to the BSOD Dump Processing App

Anyway, you can use the WMI app to check your virtual memory usage at any time, but specifically when you get the "low memory" messages.

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

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