Trick How to free up memory on a Mac
Trick How to free up memory on a Mac
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| Trick How to free up memory on a Mac |
Is your Mac running painfully slowly? Has an application just hung? Did you see a Your system has run out of application memory message or the dreaded spinning beach ball? All of these can be signs that your memory, or RAM, is being used to the max.
Read on to find out how to clear the RAM on your Mac and various helpful tips to help you clean or optimise your Mac memory, including what to do if your Mac RAM is always full. First a quick primer. RAM stands for Random access memory and it provides storage for ongoing tasks and processes. The difference between the RAM and the rest of the storage on your Mac is that its faster, therefore your Mac is designed to keep certain things in RAM in order to speed things up.
Most Macs ship with 8GB RAM, although a few older models only have 4GB RAM. This may be plenty if you dont run memory hungry applications and games, but even the most average user can come up against RAM issues due to memory hogging processes associated with badly designed web pages and apps. If your Mac is using the majority of the RAM available you may experience problems such as: Unfortunately its difficult to upgrade RAM in a Mac, as you can see from this article about . In some cases, upgrading RAM can be done, but its probably not the solution for everyone and wed suggest that you try some of the tips below before rushing out and buying more RAM.
Another option is to download a third-party app that promises to optimise your RAM we look at some such programs below. However, it should be noted that, in general, MacOS is capable of managing memory efficiently and deals with logs and cashes and the like itself, so you shouldnt really need a third party app to do that for you. However, if it's a frequent problem you are encountering then it may well be worth looking at those options. Before installing more RAM, or resorting to downloading an app, there are a number of things you can do that might free up your RAM and fix your Macs memory problems.
Restarting your computer is the simplest way to free up RAM.
If you dont want to restart your Mac what can you do to free up RAM? Read on Because its possible that your problem is related to a known issue with macOS, its always worth checking to see if you are running the most up to date version of the OS, and updating it if necessary. We cover . Our first port of call when our Mac slows down or an app freezes is to check Activity Monitor, an app that comes with your Mac.
You can find it in Utilities, or just start typing Activity Monitor into Spotlight (press command + space to bring up a Spotlight window). Activity Monitor will show you how much memory is being used and will help you identify if a particular app is using up more than its fair share of resources. Youll be able to see how your memory is being used in the Activity Monitor window. Youll see details about each process and app, such as the amount of memory, how many threads, and so on. You can also add extra columns such as Energy Impact (handy if you are on battery power) by right clicking on one of the column headers.
Below those columns youll see a graph for Memory Pressure, and data about Physical Memory, Memory Used, Cached Files, Swap Used. Next to that is a section for App Memory, Wired Memory, and Compressed. As for what that all means, App Memory is whats actually being used by apps and processes, Wired memory is whats been reserved for apps and cant be freed up, and Compressed is inactive memory that cant be used by other apps. That will all add up to the Memory Used figure. The Cached Files figure represents the unassigned memory that is available to you. (If you are wondering what Swap Used is, its the memory being used by macOS, so its already accounted for in the Memory Used calculation).
In the Memory Pressure section you will see a graph that gives an overview of how much pressure your system is under. Ideally the graph will be green, but if you are short of memory it will be yellow, or worse, red. It is possible that the graph will be red even if it looks like you have lots of memory available, so it can be a good indication of problems. Note: You shouldnt close a process if you dont know what it is as it may be required by your Mac. If you glanced at Activity Monitor and noticed that certain apps appeared to be hogging resources even though you werent using them maybe you didnt even realise they were running, you may benefit from closing them down. Even if you dont look in Activity Monitor, a quick glance at your Dock could identify a few running apps that you could quit, thereby freeing up some resources.
If you look at the Dock youll notice that some apps have a dot below their icon these apps are open. Speaking of apps that might be running in the background and using up resources, you can stop some apps from automatically starting up whenever you turn on your Mac, and this may also free up some RAM. In terms of suspect apps, its not always just the RAM thats being hogged by an app. Sometimes an app might be using a lot of processing power, which could have the effect of slowing things down. Perhaps a kernel_task is running in the background and taking up a lot of the resources. If that is the case you wont be able to kill that process this is because a kernel_task represents a collection of operating system processes. The only way to stop a kernel_task is to restart your Mac. However, it may be that the troublesome Kernel_Task is related to a hardware issue which needs addressing, and until you do you may keep seeing this reoccurring problem. In which case, you might want to .
Then under General choose a folder to be shown when you open a new Finder window. Once youve changed this destination you need to Relaunch the Finder. (Right-click on the Finder icon in the Dock while holding Option/Alt button and choose Relaunch.) One of the websites you have visited may be a memory hog. Delete browser extensions If you have installed web browser extensions it may be the case that one of them is the RAM guzzling culprit. To remove a browser extension from Safari, open Safari > Preferences, click on the extensions tab, choose the extension you want to uninstall, and click Uninstall. Another Finder related tip.
As each Finder window can have an impact on RAM usage, either close Finder windows that you arent using, or merge all the Finder windows together. In the Finder, click on Window > Merge All Windows.
If you are running out of RAM your Macs drive can be used as virtual memory so free up some storage space if you are running out of RAM. The recommendation is to keep 20% of your drive space free. You could delete large unused files, old downloads, and old apps. Have you sent anything to print recently? Its possible that a big print job is queued up and that has caused your Mac to hang. We dont recommend this unless you are an advanced user, but you could try opening Terminal and typing in: sudo purge.
But if, for example, your Mac doesnt have as much RAM as youd like, then a third party app may turn out to be cheaper and less hassle than attempting to add more RAM yourself. Wed advise that you use a tool from the Mac App Store as you can be confident that it is approved by Apple.
Here are a couple of apps that you could try: This app offers you more than 30 tools including a Free Memory tool. The benefit here is that you get loads of other handy tools such as Find Duplicates so you can delete things you don't need and free up space, an easy way to take screenshots and record video, and loads more. When we ran it we regained more than 1GB memory. Theres a free trial available , or it costs 15.99 a year.
This will purge your Macs inactive memory something you might want to do after closing a particularly intensive app or game. Some features are available via the free app but there is an in-app purchase to gain more tools. When we ran it is freed up about 1GB. Download it .
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