Activity Monitor - Column Heading Memory Types

Question

I'm chasing a memory issue in my MBP, and am using Activity Monitor to try to figure it out. I've found explanations for "Wired", "Active", "Inactive", and "Free". Makes sense to me, no problemo.
Now comes the interesting part, trying to map processes to memory use. I've added all the available memory columns to Activity Monitor, but cannot find any correlation between the column headings and the memory reported in the bottom area/pie chart.
How do the Shared, Real, Private and Virtual Memory column headings map to the Wired, Active, Inactive and Free categories at the bottom?
There are plenty of explanations on what to be concerned about with the various pie chart categories. However, I'm trying to determine when an particular process is getting out of hand, and would like to understand what each of the column headings really mean, and in particular, how they map to the pie chart categories.

Answer 1

As Kappy says, the virtual memory information is mostly meaningless except to developers, and most of them do not really care.
In this case the Java VM usage is most likely a math error on the part of either the operating system, or Activity Monitor (when a 64-bit number goes negative, but is then displayed as an unsigned value, it can look like what you are seeing; ignore it).
What you ARE interested in is "Real Memory" usage, and who is using it.  Look at those numbers in Activity Monitor.
If you want to see if pageout activity is affecting your performance, then start Applicaitons -> Utilities -> Terminal and run the command "sar -g 60 100" which will report pageout numbers once a minute for 100 minutes (adjust the numbers to suit your tastes).   Mostly zero means no pages outs.  Occassional spikes generally occur when starting an app or switching to an app which has been idle for awhile.  Sustained pageouts starts to indicate a problem.  High sustained pageouts means you could benefit from either having more RAM or running fewer concurrent applications.