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I'm pretty sure this functionality could also be achieved using the purge command (without having command line utile installed). I'm not sure how hard it is to updates yours but that would probably be a better path for end users since it doesn't require another installation to operate

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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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  • 5 years later...

 

On 3/15/2013 at 2:23 AM, snej said:

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.

 

I don't think you're right. I have a High Sierra OS running on my Mac Mini and I need to use constantly an app that "free" the ram of my computer because if I don't my Mac Mini is unusable. before that app I was restarting the Mac mini everytime I was in the slow zone. it was frustrating but that app has been something very helpful.

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5 hours ago, albertkinng said:

I don't think you're right.

 

@snej is absolutely right. It costs nothing to store something in RAM, so modern operating systems just leave stuff that isn't currently in use in there unless they need the space. That way, when you run an app or load a library, if it's still sitting in RAM it will load far, far faster.

 

You would expect your RAM to be full most of the time once the machine has been running for a while. Empty RAM is wasted RAM.

 

It's more likely that you just don't have enough RAM to run High Sierra (4GB absolute minimum, I'd say, and you can't go crazy on apps) and/or your OS is paging heavily. Have you tried watching memory usage in Activity Monitor to see what's using all your RAM?

 

Edited by deanishe
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/23/2018 at 11:16 PM, deanishe said:

 

@snej is absolutely right. It costs nothing to store something in RAM, so modern operating systems just leave stuff that isn't currently in use in there unless they need the space. That way, when you run an app or load a library, if it's still sitting in RAM it will load far, far faster.

 

You would expect your RAM to be full most of the time once the machine has been running for a while. Empty RAM is wasted RAM.

 

It's more likely that you just don't have enough RAM to run High Sierra (4GB absolute minimum, I'd say, and you can't go crazy on apps) and/or your OS is paging heavily. Have you tried watching memory usage in Activity Monitor to see what's using all your RAM?

 

 

Yep. All modern systems utilise available memory to speed up operations, which are naturally slow (like disk I/O). Kernel memory management is responsible for releasing such cached data when memory is really needed by another process/app.

 

For example, see this: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/.

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Well I have iStats Menu Pro installed and everytime I launch RightFont app you can see how fast the ram icon get full and everything freezes. I need to wait like 15 mins to be able to use my computer again. And that’s just one example. With the Ram reset it works flawlessly. I guess I need to max out the ram of my Mac then. 

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