Working Sets

Now that we’ve looked at how Windows keeps track of physical memory, and how much memory it can support, we’ll explain how Windows keeps a subset of virtual addresses in physical memory.

As you’ll recall, the term used to describe a subset of virtual pages resident in physical memory is called a working set. There are three kinds of working sets:

  • Process working sets contain the pages referenced by threads within a single process.

  • System working sets contains the resident subset of the pageable system code (for example, Ntoskrnl.exe and drivers), paged pool, and the system cache.

  • Each session has a working set that contains the resident subset of the kernel-mode session-specific data structures allocated by the kernel-mode part of the ...

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