Activity monitor inconsistancy - what is real virtual memory size???

Question

When I look at my activity montior system memory screen I see real and virtual memory in MB (with the largest at about 500MB).  As in my previous post I see a VM size of >240GB.  When I go to the File menu and hit Save... and then look at the resulting processes.txt file I see that the virtual memory is now listed in GB.  The real memory is consistent with what I see on the activity monitor window.  See below.  What's up?  Which virtual memory is real and which is "virtual"?
Active Memory: 1.47 GB
Free Memory: 846.1 MB
Wired Memory: 770.8 MB
Used Memory: 3.17 GB
Inactive Memory: 972.1 MB
Total VM: 231.35 GB
Number of processes: 100
PID    Process Name              User       CPU      Real Mem        Virtual Mem   
0      kernel_task               root       4.9      384.3 MB        4.45 GB         
1      launchd                   root       0.0      2.2 MB          2.34 GB         
11     UserEventAgent            root       0.0      4.4 MB          2.35 GB         
12     kextd                     root       0.0      3.4 MB          2.33 GB         
14     notifyd                   root       0.0      1.5 MB          2.34 GB         
15     securityd                 root       0.0      8.9 MB          2.36 GB         
16     powerd                    root       0.0      1.8 MB          2.35 GB         
17     configd                   root       0.0      4.5 MB          2.34 GB         
18     syslogd                   root       0.0      1.1 MB          2.34 GB         
19     diskarbitrationd          root       0.0      1.5 MB          2.33 GB         
20     distnoted                 root       0.0      2.1 MB          2.35 GB         
21     cfprefsd                  root       0.0      1.8 MB          2.33 GB         
22     opendirectoryd            root       0.0      9.8 MB          2.36 GB         
25     warmd                     nobody     0.0      5.5 MB          2.34 GB         
26     usbmuxd                   _usbmuxd   0.0      2.3 MB          2.34 GB         
29     stackshot                 root       0.0      1.2 MB          2.33 GB         
30     SleepServicesD            root       0.0      1.5 MB          2.33 GB         
32     revisiond                 root       0.0      2.6 MB          2.35 GB         
37     mds                       root       0.0      124.2 MB        3.04 GB         
38     mDNSResponder             _mdnsrespo 0.0      3.8 MB          2.34 GB         
41     loginwindow               prdwyer    0.0      27.8 MB         2.47 GB         
42     locationd                 _locationd 0.0      7.3 MB          2.36 GB         

Answer 1

Ignore that. The method it's calculated works as following:
1. You have the Finder and Safari open.
2. Both programs and no other ones use the content of a single block of data. This block takes up 2MB of RAM or swapfile space.
3. The block is counted as 4MB in the VM size entry because it's being used twice.
Expanding the scenario over many processes and blocks adds up to a VM size figure which is far larger than the actual amount in use or the combined total of RAM and swapfile space.
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