I have seen this question and it is not a duplicate, title notwithstanding, since the given answer does not answer my question.
I currently have a Windows XP system that reports system Commit usage as less than the Physical Memory usage. My understanding was that System Commit was the total amount of pagefile plus RAM usage. As phrased by Wikipedia:
The amount of pagefile that would be used if all current contents of RAM had to be removed.
So how is it possible to have RAM usage higher than the sum of RAM and pagefile usage?
Best Answer
The commit charge amount doesn't include all physical memory; it only counts all physical memory that could be paged to disk.
From Pushing the Limits of Windows -- Virtual Memory (I'd recommend reading the entire article)
and
So some OS memory usage doens't count to that limit as well as memory mapped files. In Windows all EXE and DLL files are loaded as memory mapped files. They are loaded into physical memory, but since they are not modified after loading (usually) Windows doesn't back them by the page file, since it knows that it can just re-read them from their disk file - which is why they don't count towards the commit limit.