Why doesn't Taskmanager show all memory use?

My laptop has 8gb of installed ram, when I run a VMWare virtual machine my memory usage increases but I can't find what process/thing is causing this. (I know that it's VMWare ofcourse but why doesn't taskmngr show me that???)

Here are some screenshots i took from Taskmanager:

In the upper screenshot you see a memory usage of 82% where only 437,9mb is for my user. In the other screenshot you see the same details (84% usage now because it was taken a bit later)

Does anyone know how I can view the correct memory usage with all programs / processes that are using it?

Solution 1:

Use Resource Monitor to see detailed memory usage. In Task Manager navigate to Performance tab and click on "Resource Monitor..." at the bottom of the window. In Resource Monitor window navigate to Memory tab. There you'll see four columns: Commit (KB), Working Set (KB), Shareable (KB), Private (KB). Apparently Task Manager Processes tab shows only Private memory usage.

Solution 2:

Run RAMMap to see much more details.

It shows the information better compared to task manager.

Solution 3:

I believe the memory reserved by VMWare doesn't show up because of how it is reserving it.

There are some different settings in VMWare Workstation that lets you control how VMWare Workstation allocates/reserves memory.

There are 3 options in VMWare Workstation on Linux:

• Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM
• Allow some virtual machine memory to be swapped
• Allow most virtual machine memory to be swapped

Option 1 pre-allocates the memory and I can see that it is used in the host system.