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Asked: 2026-05-24T15:46:37+00:00

I’ve been doing some work on high memory issues, and I’ve been doing a

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I’ve been doing some work on high memory issues, and I’ve been doing a lot of heap analysis in windbg, and I was curious what the different columns really mean in “!heap -flt -s xxxx” command.

I read What do the 'size' numbers mean in the windbg !heap output?, and I looked in my “Windows Internals” book, but I still had a bunch of questions. So the columns and my questions are below.

**HEAP_ENTRY** - What does this pointer really point to? How is it different than UserPtr?
**Size** - What does this size mean? How is it different than UserSize?
**Prev** - This just appears to be the negative offset to get to the previous heap entry. Still not sure exactly how it's used.
**Flags** - Is there any documentation on these flags?
**UserPtr** - What is the user pointer? In all cases I've seen it's always 8 bytes higher than the HEAP_ENTRY, but I don't really know what it points to.
**UserSize** - This appears to be the size of the actual allocation.
**state** - This just tells you what state of this heap entry is (free, busy, etc....)

Example:
HEAP_ENTRY Size Prev Flags    UserPtr UserSize - state
  0015eeb0 0044 0000  [07]   0015eeb8    00204 - (busy)
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  1. Editorial Team

    HEAP_ENTRY
    Heaps store allocated blocks in contiguous Segments of memory, each allocated block starts with a 8-bytes header followed by the actual allocated data. The HEAP_ENTRY column is the address of the beginning of the header of the allocated block.

    Size
    The heap manager handles blocks in multiple of 8 bytes. The column is the number of 8 bytes chunk allocated. In your sample, 0044 means that the block takes 0x220 bytes (0x44*8).

    Prev
    Multiply per 8 to have the negative offset in bytes to the previous heap block.

    Flags
    This is a bitmask that encodes the following information

    0x01 - HEAP_ENTRY_BUSY
0x02 - HEAP_ENTRY_EXTRA_PRESENT
0x04 - HEAP_ENTRY_FILL_PATTERN
0x08 - HEAP_ENTRY_VIRTUAL_ALLOC
0x10 - HEAP_ENTRY_LAST_ENTRY

    UserPtr
    This is the pointer returned to the application by the HeapAlloc (callbed by malloc/new) function. Since the header is always 8 bytes long, it is always HEAP_ENTRY +8.

    UserSize
    This is the size passed the HeapAlloc function.

    state
    This is a decoding of the Flags column, telling if the entry is busy, freed, last of its segment, …

    Be aware that in Windows 7/2008 R2, heaps are by default using a front-end named LFH (Low fragmented heap) that uses the default heap manager to allocate chunks in which it dispatched user allocated data. For these heaps, UserPtr and UserSize will not point to real user data.
    The output of !heap -s displays which heaps are LFH enabled.

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