Need help determine Total Allocated Virtual Memory

The difference in numbers between the PowerShell script using the Get-Process cmdlet and the MemoryStatusEx API results might be due to the different ways they calculate and report memory information.

The Get-Process cmdlet retrieves information from the Windows performance counters, which may not align directly with the information obtained from the MemoryStatusEx API, as it queries the system memory status directly.

The MemoryStatusEx API provides information about the overall system memory, including available, allocated, and free memory. Conversely, the Get-Process cmdlet focuses on the memory usage of a specific process, reporting metrics such as Virtual Memory Size (VirtualMemorySize64) and Working Set (WorkingSet64).

If you want to retrieve memory information similar to what the MemoryStatusEx API provides, you might need to explore other Windows API functions or use P/Invoke in PowerShell to call native functions. This approach requires more advanced scripting and knowledge of Windows API programming.

Here are a few suggestions:

P/Invoke in PowerShell: If you decide to explore P/Invoke, you can refer to the following resources:

• Use PowerShell to Duplicate Process Tokens via P/Invoke
• PINVOKE or accessing WIN32 APIs - PowerShell Team

Windows API Functions: Consider Windows API functions like GlobalMemoryStatusEx, which can be used to retrieve system-wide memory information.

Performance Counters: Explore other performance counters related to system memory, which you can access using PowerShell’s Get-Counter cmdlet.

Here’s a basic example using Get-Counter:

$memoryCounter = Get-Counter '\Memory\Available MBytes'
$availableMemory = $memoryCounter.CounterSamples.CookedValue

Write-Host "Available Memory: $availableMemory MB"