All recent versions of macOS and OS X have used similar memory handling for years and not much has changed.Apple Mac OS X is generally good at memory management but I sometimes find the inactive memory takes a long time to be released as free memory and my system can grind to a bit of a halt if I need to start up a virtual machine. Clearing them fixes certain.First, you need to understand how the Mac handles memory. When you use a browser, like Chrome, it saves some information from websites in its cache and cookies. Free Memory Cleaner Mac 10.6.8 Mac Memory CleanerClear cache & cookies. With Memory Cleaner, you can easily manage your memory usage.The Wired Memory figure is also apps and macOS memory usage, (important memory not to be messed with).The total memory used is App Memory + Wired Memory, which is 1.59GB + 585.1MB or about 2.18GB. The App memory is the amount of memory used by apps that are running. Subtracting the memory used from the physical memory does not tell you how much memory is free.Look at the right-hand side of the table in Activity Monitor. Subtract one from the other and the amount of free memory is therefore 0.34GB or 340MB.The Memory Clean utility from the Mac App Store confirms this:There is a slight difference in MB, but that’s because the memory free has changed a little when I ran Memory Clean.The problem is that this figure is wrong. Select the memory tab at the top and down at the bottom of the window is a table containing various figures showing how OS X is using the RAM in your Mac.This is Yosemite, but macOS Sierra is almost identicalThis looks straightforward and in the left column it says that the physical memory is 4.00GB and the memory used is 3.66GB. MemoryFreer does just what it says - free up memory, especially the inactive memory that occupies the precious RAM on your machine.Go to the Applications/Utilities folder and run Activity Monitor.Rather than leave it empty and unused, macOS stores recently run apps in it.This means that you can think of File Cache as free memory. When macOS has lots of free memory that isn’t being used for anything, it will hang on to apps you have quit just in case you want to run them again.Some people check their email 10 times a day and if the app is still in memory, macOS can restart it in an instant without having to find and load it off the disk drive.Apps are cached when nothing else wants to use the memory. However, the File Cache figure rises. If you run an app, such as Mail, you will see that the App Memory figure increases and this is because more memory is in use.If you quit Mail, the App Memory figure goes down as memory usage falls. Memory that is not used is simply wasted, so macOS puts it to good use. This is significantly different to the amount that Memory Clean claims is free.The confusion arises because of the way that macOS uses memory.The File Cache is 1.10GB, which, remember, is like unused memory. Activity Monitor is right and Memory Clean is wrong. Notice that it is green in the screen shots, yet Memory Clean has changed to red in the menu bar to alert me that there is just 24.51 MB of memory free.Memory Clean red alert! Only 23.42 MB free memory! But the green bar in Activity Monitor says that memory usage is fine. Green is OK, orange is not so good and red is really bad. The apps need more memory, so the File Cache is reduced and falls from 1.50GB to 1.10GB.This is a balancing act that macOS constantly performs, using free memory as File Cache and reducing it as apps need memory, then increasing it when apps quit.The scrolling Memory Pressure chart in Activity Monitor shows whether you are short of memory. Watch what happens when I run a bunch of apps.Memory Used has increased from 3.66GB to 3.98GB and App Memory has increased from 1.59GB to 2.34GB because more apps are now running.
Memory Mac OS X Is GenerallyI would leave macOS to figure out the best way to use memory rather than try to force it to work in some other way.Memory cleaners can be useful under some cirmumstances, but you can gain in one way and lose in another. It appears to work because the free memory figure that it displays increases, but as pointed out, this figure is not calculated correctly and so is misleading. It’s a bit like adding files you don’t use very often to a zip archive, only OS X does it automatically and at lightning speed on the fly.So is Memory Clean and other memory cleaners (there are many more) actually useful? I am not convinced by what I saw when using the app. When macOS gets really short of memory, it compresses bits that haven’t been used for a while. Best mac for app development 2016When you need to access those apps and data, it can take longer.The next app you open will run better, but apps that are already open with run poorer.If you are the sort of person that leaves their Mac running for weeks at a time, just reboot it every so often.
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