"Why is my “Committed” memory so much higher than my actual RAM space?" Because "committed" is mostly process-private virtual address space, and some of this can be in RAM and some in the pagefile.
And some might not occupy any storage at all! That's if it's been allocated but never accessed, hence not "faulted in", yet. But it still counts against the "commit limit" because if it's it accessed in the future, it will occupy storage then. And that's too late for the system to say "sorry, we're all out of room."
The whole point of virtual memory is that it can be much larger than physical (RAM), no?
btw... you appear to have a pagefile of about 24 GB, since you have 8 GB RAM and the commit limit is 32 GB. So your "committed" could be as high as 32 GB. (And at the moment it almost is that high, so reducing or eliminating the pagefile would be a bad idea.)
Whereas RAM used is just that. So, of course, RAM used + pagefile used can be larger than RAM used.
Part of the whole point of virtual memory, after all, is that you can have more virtual memory in use than you have physical memory (RAM).
If you want to find out what's using committed memory you need to look at Task Manager's "Details" tab and enable the "Commit size" column.
Nor will the total of the "Commit size" columns add up to the "commit charge" (30.1 GB on your machine), because other things contribute to commit charge: Nonpaged and paged pool and some more "subtle" mechanisms like copy-on-write sections, pagefile-backed sections, AWE mappings... but these are usually small compared to process-private v.a.s.)
On that tab, the "Memory (Private working set)" column corresponds to what the "Processes" tab shows for "Memory". This is the RAM currently assigned to each process for its committed virtual address space. The remainder will be in the pagefile. But, again, processes have other types of address space, mostly of the sort called "mapped", and some fraction of that will be in RAM as well. There are other system-wide things created by the OS, not specific to any process, that use up RAM too.
In short the "Processes" tab's "Memory" column is not supposed to add up to the total RAM being used. It only shows how much of the total usage is being used privately by each process.
1post dome details about your hardware. Do you use a Broadcom Wifi device? – magicandre1981 – 2015-09-12T15:55:56.410