Many people who are studying error messages and knowledgebase of microsoft operating system stumbles on this term “commit charge”. But what the hell is commit charge ?
As per Wikipedia:
In computing, commit charge is a term used in Microsoft Windows operating systems to describe the total amount of virtual address space for which the backing store is the pagefile.
In laymen’s terms, commit charge is the current amount of used virtual memory. It can be considered the sum total of the RAM and pagefile needed to store the private virtual address space allocated by all running processes, if they actually used all they allocate. Most applications allocate more than they actually use. Memory for program code, DLL’s etc. is not included in this total.
Windows keeps track of the commit charge to make sure that there is some place to store all of this potential data, just in case the running applications were to use all the space they have allocated. The commit limit is the size of RAM, minus some overhead, plus the size of the pagefile. Not all of RAM is available to the commit charge.
The important thing to remember about the commit charge is that it must always be below the commit limit. If it hits the limit bad things will happen, such as application or system failures. Since the commit charge doesn’t represent anything physical it is of little importance to performance.
