7 This check measures the current usage of physical RAM and
10 The "commit charge" was previously confusingly named "pagefile".
11 Please note that Microsoft themselves use this naming in
13 Due to how Windows optimizes memory management, physical memory
14 is in practice almost always fully utilized. The Memory usage this
15 check displays says how much memory is actually required by processes,
16 in contrast to caches that could be freed if the need arises.
18 In the same vein Windows may hold data in RAM and pagefile at the same
19 time or it may hold data in the pagefile even if there is RAM available,
20 when it determines this may improve performance.
21 As a result, the real pagefile usage is not only hard to
22 determine, it's also utterly useless when we want to determine
23 resource usage on the system.
25 The commit charge instead tells us how much of the memory used in
26 total (RAM + page file) is really required, ignoring overlap and caches.
27 Commit Charge minus used RAM is approximately the amount
28 of the pagefile used for "relevant" data, but further optimizations
29 may lead to offsets (to the point where Commit Charge - RAM can be negative).
31 The page file metric is determined using the fields 'ullTotalPageFile'
32 (current committed memory limit for the system or the current
33 process, whichever is smaller) and 'ullAvailPageFile' (maximum
34 amount of memory the current process can commit) of the MEMORYSTATUSEX
35 structure as returned by the windows API function 'GlobalMemoryStatusEx'.
41 {mem.win} creates one check for each host that provides
42 data about the page file. If that information is missing,
43 a Unix-like system is assumed and the check {mem.used} is