What is WinDbg Memory?

Question

I\'m debugging a Winforms application for a memory leak. In the dump file provided by the customer there is a large discrepancy between the unknown memory usage and the .NET

Answer 1

Memory that is reported as <unknown> by WinDbg is memory that was allocated via VirtualAlloc(). Some commonly known sources are:

• .NET (because it has its own heap manager)
• direct VirtualAlloc() calls in your code
• C++ HeapAlloc() calls that are larger than some limit (512k if I recall correctly)
• MSXML
• Bitmaps (according to @Hans Passant's comment)