Memory Leak or Faulty Memory Use Reporting? Needing some expert opinio

Afternoon ladies n' gents, so here's the deal:

Under task manager it reports that my processes are using 48% of my memory.

Now, after taking a moment to fire up the ol' calculator and adding up all the individual reported memory usage for each process, it's almost an even 2 gig of 8 gig of RAM... or 25%.

Where is Windows getting this 48% figure from? It doesn't appear that it's a sum total of the aforementioned processes and under performance it explicitly says 3.8 is being used.

What's going on here? Is there something hidden? Is this faulty reporting? Or am I witnessing a memory leak?

If it's a memory leak, is there a way to identify the culprit and/or resolve it without always having to restart the PC?

Thanks.

Adding up the process memory usage numbers will never equal total usage. There is no way this is possible.

I am assuming you are looking at the process list with default configuration. The numbers shown are only for the private working set of the process. The total working set of a process will typically be considerably higher. Also be sure you have selected "Show processes from all users" or you will see only your own processes and miss the system processes. But there is more.

There are major users of memory that are not processes. These include, but are not limited to, the Nonpaged pool, the resident portion of the paged pool and the file cache. Note that the later is NOT included in the value labeled "Cached" on the Performance tab. Not all of these values are accounted for in Task Manager.

Any modern OS is far too complex (far more than you imagine) to fully account for memory usage by simply adding up a column of numbers. What you are seeing is quite normal.

Well, in considering what you just said, here's some screenshots for context. Note that at the time these were taken Chrome was not running dropping down the usage to about 30% of that 8 gig. Having said that, something still is off here. Further whats the point of reporting if it's not accurate or that one can't ascertain how it all breaks down?

Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're trying to say but that's a pretty sizable chunk of memory, would you not agree? From a glance that's a full gig off or more. Can those other details you mention really be attributed to what I'm witnessing?

Jesaynt said:

Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're trying to say but that's a pretty sizable chunk of memory, would you not agree? From a glance that's a full gig off or more. Can those other details you mention really be attributed to what I'm witnessing?

The numbers reported in Task Manager are accurate. They just don't account for all memory usage. The purpose of Task Manager was never to allow full accounting of memory usage. Do not attempt to do so as it will only result in more confusion. It takes a great deal of knowledge to really understand this. I don't claim to have this knowledge. This is far more complex than you imagine.

You are by no means the first to notice this. People are confused by Linux and Mac OSX memory management as well.

The other details I mentioned can most certainly account for 1 GB of memory usage and more:

The Nonpaged value is 224 MB. All of this is in RAM.
The Paged pool is 735 MB. Not all of this is in RAM but a large portion is.
The file cache, not shown in Task Manager at all, can easily be 250 MB or more. Sometimes much more.
Other memory users not shown in Task Manager at all.

Much of this is shown by other utilities. This could have been included in Task Manager but it would have made it more complex and even more confusing to most people.