What exactly does commit charge mean?

[Mark R]

I don't really understand this. I run Vista 32 bit, but when I'm working hard, with lots of apps loaded, the commit charge gets up to about 5.9 GB. (The machine has 6 GB of physical RAM because it is occasionally used as a 64-bit hackintosh).

How is vista 32 allocating 5.9 GB of memory? Or is that not what it actually means?

And is the lack of 32 bitness likely to be causing performance problems?

 

[Modelworks]

From the MS Press windows internals book

Memory: Committed Bytes --- Number of bytes of virtual (not reserved) memory that has been
committed. This number doesn’t necessarily represent page file
usage because it includes private committed pages in physical
memory that have never been paged out. Rather, it represents the
charged amount that must be backed by page file space and/or RAM.

Memory: Commit Limit -Number of bytes of virtual memory that can be committed without
having to extend the paging files; if the paging files can be extended,
this limit is soft.
Paging File: % Usage---- Percentage of the paging file committed.
Paging File: % Usage---- Peak Highest percentage of the paging file committed.