"Empty Working Set" option in RAMMap

Question

What does this option basically do? Does it free the unused memory? If so, how does it affect the performance? In what cases will I use it?

Answer 1

Excerpt from my copy of Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference 1st ed:

■ Empty Working Sets Removes memory from all user-mode and system working sets to the Standby or Modified page lists. Note that by the time you refresh RAMMap’s data, processes that run any code will necessarily populate their working sets to do so.

■ Empty System Working Set Removes memory from the system cache working set.

From personal experience, I just used taskmgr to view the memory changes.

Initial - 6.41 GB

After opening RamMap - 7.19 GB

After doing Empty working set - 5.45 GB

Close RamMap - 4.68 GB

Also, an image of the same below:

Answer 2

From the VMMap Help manual:

The Empty Working Set menu item in the Refresh menu releases all physical memory assigned to the process and then refreshes the scan.

I would assume that the feature is similar for RAM map and that the "Empty Working Set" feature releases all physical memory.