Windows Internals, Part 1: System architecture, processes, threads, memory management, and more, Seventh Edition

Working set management

Every process starts with a default working set minimum of 50 pages and a working set maximum of 345 pages. Although it has little effect, you can change these working set limits with the Windows SetProcessWorkingSetSize function, although you must have the increase scheduling priority (SeIncreaseBasePriorityPrivilege) privilege to do this. However, unless you have configured the process to use hard working set limits, these limits are ignored. That is, the memory manager will permit a process to grow beyond its maximum if it is paging heavily and there is ample memory. (Conversely the memory manager will shrink a process below its working set minimum if it is not paging and there is a high demand for physical memory on ...