I did an experiment today.

After a clean restart, I opened no programs except for System Monitor. It showed 50 MB allocated memory out of 512 MB of physical RAM, no swapfile usage out of a static 1024 MB swapfile. I then left it for about an hour.

After said time, the allocated memory read 200 MB. No swapfile usage (I have ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 in system.ini).

I did this experiment because I noticed that, even with my optimized system (drivers I don't need turned off, startup programs I don't need turned off, etc.) that only uses 50 MB of RAM after a clean reboot, I can be working for a few hours and notice that all 512 MB of RAM has been allocated to... something. Even if I close all of my programs and wait a while, nope! Still full up. Somehow, though it doesn't seem to affect performance.

Just now I was doing some work for about 3.5 hours, and the RAM filled up as usual. I just kept working as it didn't affect performance. After I was done, I tried loading Firefox to see if I could get it to delve into the swapfile. But it didn't... swapfile usage remained at zero while the allocated memory remained at the full 512 MB.

So, is the allocated memory reading inaccurate? Is Windows "allocating" memory for *something* it thinks I need, but said memory is still available to be reallocated to programs that need it? Or do I have some kind of memory leak?

Basically, I am a RAM usage freak. I like the idea of being able to start my computer, have 50 MB RAM usage, work for several hours, then close ALL of my programs and have the RAM usage drop right back down to 50 MB where it was before. In reality I know that this doesn't even happen with modern Linux machines. The only place this ever happens for me is in DOS.... [LGR voice]Ahhh, MS-DOS.[/LGR voice]