In windows xp task manager what does the green and red lines in the preformance tab mean?

Question

where the graph moves and shows memory usage i have a red and green lines thanks for everyones answers

Answer 1

CPU usage, and page file usage. CPU affects how fast you computer runs... not sure about page file usage.

Answer 2

i believe it is related to total utilization

in the end learn how to use your computer

its like learning the names of the components of the elements of a stove top

just learn to use your computer for good purpose

Answer 3

The red line shows the kernel times (the amount of time the kernel is doing things -- usually on behalf of some user-level request), while the green line show the total for all activities.

The variation is because lots of your tasks are sitting in timer loops -- they wake up every few seconds and check if there's anything useful to do. The variation is normal; you can see which tasks are doing things using the processes window.

You can think of this 6-22% as being the parasitic load placed on the processor by all the background tasks running on your computer. For the most part, this activity is always going on, even when the CPU has better things to do (although some tasks are clever enough to detect that the cpu is not busy and do more background processing during inactive times).

Put another way, your processor is being restricted to 78-94% of its native ability by all the background tasks using CPU cycles.

(This information came from Alatar 1, when answering a similar question on the The Elder Geek.com, forum. I hoped it to be a more informative answer than the 'gobble-t-goop' I could type! lol!)