How reliable is windows task manager for determining memory usage of programs?

Question

Can I use task manager to detect huge memory leaks? I have a small text parsing program that shows memory usage of around 640K when I launch it. When I parse a file and in

Answer 1

TaskMgr is an extremely crude tool, but it is useful nonetheless. If you have memory leaks in the one megabyte range, then it is probably good enough to tell that you have them. But, eventually, you'll be looking for leaks in the 10 kilobyte and under ranges, and TaskMgr is useless for those.