Memory Cleaner Apps Mac RAM Usage

Heres how to free up memory on a Mac (or how to free up RAM), including ways to reduce Mac RAM usage without restarting.

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.

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.

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.

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 its a frequent problem you are encountering then it may well be worth looking at those options.

Theres a reason why the IT desk always tells you to turn it off and on again, most of the time it will solve your problem.

You can find it in Utilities, or just start typing Activity Monitor into Spotlight (press command space to bring up a Spotlight 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.

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.

This will make it easier to see which process or app is hogging the RAM.

If its a web page causing issues rather than quit your browser it will just close and reload that page.

On-the-other-hand if you were to quit a Photoshop process the application itself will close (and youll probably see a closed unexpectedly warning.

If you look at the Dock youll notice that some apps have a dot below their icon - these apps are open.

Sometimes an app might be using a lot of processing power, which could have the effect of slowing things down.

If that is the case you wont be able to kill that process - this is because a kerneltask represents a collection of operating system processes.

However, it may be that the troublesome KernelTask is related to a hardware issue which needs addressing, and until you do you may keep seeing this reoccurring problem.

Memory Cleaner Apps For Mac