Commit charge

In computing, commit charge is a term used in Microsoft Windows operating systems to describe the total amount of virtual memory of all processes that must be backed by either physical memory or the page file.^[1] Through the process of paging, the contents of this virtual memory may move between physical memory and the page file, but it cannot exceed the sum of sizes of those two. As a percentage, commit charge is the utilization of this limit.

Virtual memory not related to commit charge includes virtual memory backed by files and all-zero pages backed by nothing.

^ Russinovich, Mark (17 November 2008). "Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory". Mark's Blog. learn.microsoft.com. Archived from the original on 22 October 2022. Retrieved 15 December 2022. Reserved virtual memory can't actually store data or code, but applications sometimes use a reservation to create a large block of virtual memory and then commit it as needed to ensure that the committed memory is contiguous in the address space. When a process commits a region of virtual memory, the operating system guarantees that it can maintain all the data the process stores in the memory either in physical memory or on disk.

[pushing-limits-1] Russinovich, Mark (17 November 2008). "Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory". Mark's Blog. learn.microsoft.com. Archived from the original on 22 October 2022. Retrieved 15 December 2022. Reserved virtual memory can't actually store data or code, but applications sometimes use a reservation to create a large block of virtual memory and then commit it as needed to ensure that the committed memory is contiguous in the address space. When a process commits a region of virtual memory, the operating system guarantees that it can maintain all the data the process stores in the memory either in physical memory or on disk.

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