Reply To: Task Manager Vs Performance Monitor

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

By the way, clearing out the standby list is an excellent way of slowing a system down, much better to let the memory manager handle things 😁

When a process requires physical memory the memory manager will first try to get it from the zeroed page list, if there is not enough there then it will zero pages on free list and use those, if thats still not enough then it will go to the standby list. The standby list is divided into 8 lists with priorities 0-7 and Windows will zero pages on the lowest priority list first.

In the unlikely event that that’s still not enough or if Windows feels that it is low on free/zeroed memory then it will start to trim the working set (in use memory) of running processes, starting with the longest idle/lowest priority first.