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I want to see how much of the RAM is being used by my system.

When I go to Task Manager -> Performance and look under "Physical Memory (MB)" section, it lists 4 terms which are:-

  1. Total
  2. Cached
  3. Available
  4. Free

What is the difference between 3 and 4 ? What is the meaning of second "Cached" ?

If available is the memory available to be used up, then out of 8GB installed on my system, I can see that only <=1GB is available to be used even when only Firefox browser "only one program" is running.

RAM Usage

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Side note: Unless something has a memory leak, or you're running some heavyweight background processes (IIS/SQL/etc), that's pretty odd that you've got that little memory available/free. My system with Firefox and Outlook is running at 8142 Free, 1870 Cached, 5230 Available, 3990 Free, Uptime: ~1.5 days. –  Chris S Dec 30 '11 at 13:29

1 Answer 1

up vote 5 down vote accepted

The "Available" category is the total of the Standby cache, Free memory and the Zeroed list.




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