Private, Shared, and Potentially Shared Memory

Private memory is memory used solely by the selected process. The GC heap is part of the private memory. Shared memory is used by at least one other process in addition to the selected process. When looking for memory leaks, the private memory is usually more likely to be of concern.

Examples of shared memory are code pages and read-only data sections. Because these pages of memory don't change, the operating system can use the CPU hardware to map the physical pages of RAM into multiple address spaces. For example, every process uses code in NTDLL.DLL, but the same physical pages of RAM that hold NTDLL.DLL's code are shared between all processes.

Potentially shared memory is memory that has been marked as shareable, but it is currently only being used by one process. It might be shared at a later point if another process is requesting the same memory.