Clearing memory either moves apps and data to the disk or compresses it, maybe both.
Memory cleaners can be useful under some cirmumstances, but you can gain in one way and lose in another. I would leave macOS to figure out the best way to use memory rather than try to force it to work in some other way.
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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. 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.
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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. When macOS gets really short of memory, it compresses bits that haven’t been used for a while. One figure in Activity Monitor I haven’t mentioned is Compressed. If yet another app is run, macOS simply discards something in the File Cache and uses the memory made free. The File Cache is 1.10GB, which, remember, is like unused memory. Activity Monitor is right and Memory Clean is wrong. Memory Clean red alert! Only 23.42 MB free memory! But the green bar in Activity Monitor says that memory usage is fine. 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. Green is OK, orange is not so good and red is really bad. The scrolling Memory Pressure chart in Activity Monitor shows whether you are short of memory. 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 apps need more memory, so the File Cache is reduced and falls from 1.50GB to 1.10GB. 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. Watch what happens when I run a bunch of apps. If you run one or more big memory-hungry apps, OS X can abandon one or more items in the File Cache and give it to the new apps being run. This means that you can think of File Cache as free memory. Rather than leave it empty and unused, macOS stores recently run apps in it. 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.Īpps are cached when nothing else wants to use the 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. If you quit Mail, the App Memory figure goes down as memory usage falls. 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. Memory that is not used is simply wasted, so macOS puts it to good use. The confusion arises because of the way that macOS uses memory. This is significantly different to the amount that Memory Clean claims is free. Therefore the amount of free memory is 4.00GB minus 2.18GB, which is 1.82GB. The total memory used is App Memory + Wired Memory, which is 1.59GB + 585.1MB or about 2.18GB. The Wired Memory figure is also apps and macOS memory usage, (important memory not to be messed with). The App memory is the amount of memory used by apps that are running. Look at the right-hand side of the table in Activity Monitor.
Subtracting the memory used from the physical memory does not tell you how much memory is free. The problem is that this figure is wrong. There is a slight difference in MB, but that’s because the memory free has changed a little when I ran Memory Clean. The Memory Clean utility from the Mac App Store confirms this: Subtract one from the other and the amount of free memory is therefore 0.34GB or 340MB. This looks straightforward and in the left column it says that the physical memory is 4.00GB and the memory used is 3.66GB.
This is Yosemite, but macOS Sierra is almost identical 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. Go to the Applications/Utilities folder and run Activity Monitor.
All recent versions of macOS and OS X have used similar memory handling for years and not much has changed. They are very popular apps, but do you really need a memory cleaner? What does it do?įirst, you need to understand how the Mac handles memory. Go to the Mac App Store, go to Categories, select Utilities and among the free and paid apps are several memory cleaners.
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