Ram & Vram. What uses what in Blender?

Hello! Still a newbie here and I have a few doubts about this issue. Blender just says mem in the top. What does that mean? Ram or vram? Could anyone give me a quick explanation on what things in blender use what? I have been messing with particle systems and I see that the mem usage goes up a lot in blender and in the operating system monitor, but then when rendering on my gpu, the memory usage is pretty low. And in other cases it’s the other way round. I am having problems with a couple of scenes, both using particle systems, one crashes due to insufficient ram and the other I don’t know why. I have also read about rendering layers to render huge scenes that require more vram than what is available. But can this be used with particle systems? I have tried putting particle systems on different render layers and still have the same ram usage. Please, could someone enlighten my way? Cheers.