snej
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snej got a reaction from Diegobit in Free memory
There's no need to "free up memory" in a modern OS. The kernel manages RAM efficiently. What the 'purge' command does is flush filesystem buffers; this will actually slow down the OS for a little while because recently-used stuff that was cached in RAM for fast access is gone and has to be slowly loaded from disk again.
As the man page for 'purge' says, "Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis." That is, it lets you reproduce the slowness of a cold-booted system. This isn't something you want to do in normal circumstances.
I'm sure some people will insist this kind of thing really does speed up their computer, but I'm pretty sure that's the placebo effect talking. When my computer starts to feel slow, I open Activity Monitor and look for which process is either hogging the CPU or allocating huge amounts of private memory, then quit that process.
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snej got a reaction from deanishe in Free memory
There's no need to "free up memory" in a modern OS. The kernel manages RAM efficiently. What the 'purge' command does is flush filesystem buffers; this will actually slow down the OS for a little while because recently-used stuff that was cached in RAM for fast access is gone and has to be slowly loaded from disk again.
As the man page for 'purge' says, "Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis." That is, it lets you reproduce the slowness of a cold-booted system. This isn't something you want to do in normal circumstances.
I'm sure some people will insist this kind of thing really does speed up their computer, but I'm pretty sure that's the placebo effect talking. When my computer starts to feel slow, I open Activity Monitor and look for which process is either hogging the CPU or allocating huge amounts of private memory, then quit that process.