Memory Usage - IGEL

The detailed diagnosis of this measure lists the name of each process, memory used by each process, percentage of memory used by each process, the name of the application and the images with args.

This measure typically indicates the amount of memory available for use by applications running on the target IGEL Endpoint.

Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. While sporadic spikes in memory usage could be caused by one/more rogue processes on the IGEL Endpoint, a consistent increase in this value could be a cause for some serious concern, as it indicates a gradual, but steady erosion of valuable memory resources. If this unhealthy trend is not repaired soon, it could severely hamper the performance of the IGEL Endpoint, causing anything from a slowdown to a complete system meltdown.

You can use the detailed diagnosis of this measure to figure out which processes on the IGEL Endpoint are consuming memory excessively.

Not all of the Available physical memory is Free physical memory. Typically, Available physical memory is made up of the Standby List, Free List, and Zeroed List.

When Windows wants to trim a process' working set, the trimmed pages are moved (usually) to the Standby List. From here, they can be brought back to life in the working set with only a soft page fault (much faster than a hard fault, which would have to talk to the disk). If a page stays in the standby List for a long time, it gets freed and moved to the Free List.

In the background, there is a low priority thread (actually, the only thread with priority 0) which takes pages from the Free List and zeros them out. Because of this, there is usually very little in the Free List.

All new allocations always come from the Zeroed List, which is memory pages that have been overwritten with zeros. This is a standard part of the OS' cross-process security, to prevent any process ever seeing data from another. If the Zeroed List is empty, Free List memory is zeroed and used or, if that is empty too, Standby List memory is freed, zeroed, and used. It is because all three can be used with so little effort that they are all counted as "available".

A high value is typically desired for this measure.

This memory contains cached data and code that is not actively in use by processes, the system and the system cache. This memory needs to be written out before it will be available for allocation to a process or for system use.

Cache pages on the modified list have been altered in memory. No process has specifically asked for this data to be in memory, it is merely there as a consequence of caching. Therefore it can be written to disk at any time (not to the page file, but to its original file location) and reused. However, since this involves I/O, it is not considered to be Available physical memory.

This memory contains cached data and code that is not actively in use by processes, the system and the system cache. It is immediately available for allocation to a process or for system use. If the system runs out of available free and zero memory, memory on lower priority standby cache page lists will be repurposed before memory on higher priority standby cache page lists.

Typically, Standby memory is the aggregate of Standby Cache Core Bytes, Standby Cache Normal Priority Bytes, and Standby Cache Reserve Bytes. Standby Cache Core Bytes is the amount of physical memory, that is assigned to the core standby cache page lists. Standby Cache Normal Priority Bytes is the amount of physical memory, that is assigned to the normal priority standby cache page lists. Standby Cache Reserve Bytes is the amount of physical memory, that is assigned to the reserve standby cache page lists.

This measure will be available only for those IGEL Endpoints that are provisioned from a Microsoft Hyper-V Hypervisor.