Review: Memory Cleaner
Product: Memory Cleaner
Manufacturer: Alice Dev Team
Date Reviewed: 5-24-11
Retail Price: $5.99 via Mac App Store
Every time your Mac opens an application, it uses more memory. But sometimes the OS doesn’t relinquish the extra RAM, even after the memory-hungry application has quit. If you work with memory intensive applications on your Mac, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Manga Studio Pro or even Maya, you’ve probably experienced your machine running at a crawl. Up until now, the two solutions for such sluggishness have been:
1) Reboot the Mac.
2) Buy more RAM.
I have 10 GB of RAM in my Mac Pro, and I find that, given the opportunity, both applications and OS will use up every bit of that memory. Quitting an app may not be enough – as the memory may still contain residual data that’s no longer being used. Rebooting, as easy as it is, wasn’t an option for me.
Thankfully, the Alice Dev Team felt the same way and, more importantly, decided to do something about it.
Memory Cleaner, a simple $5.99 app, does one thing and one thing alone: it frees up wasted memory that’s not being used and, in turn, makes your Mac run faster. The application itself has a tiny footprint, weighing in at under 400KB. The best part of Memory Cleaner is that you don’t need to restart your Mac to reap the benefits. Simply invoke the app and click the “Clean My Memory” button and you will see how much additional free memory you have available.
It’s pretty straight-forward. I have gotten into the habit of running Memory Cleaner when I’ve finished using a memory hungry application. The reclaimed space averages anywhere between 200MB to 1GB, depending upon the application you’ve recently quit. When you’ve clicked the “Clean My Memory” button, you’ll get this dialog box:
No biggie – as the runtime operation of Memory Cleaner is usually a few seconds or so.
So, the application works as advertised. But you’re probably asking: is it worth the $6.00? Wouldn’t it be easier to reboot and just call it a day?
For most people – yes, $6.00 is overkill. But if you are running several memory intensive applications $6.00 is a small price to pay to reclaim wasted memory and improve overall performance. As I maintain 3 computers at home, the average cost per machine worked out to $2.00 – so I feel that the app was completely worth it. In a perfect world, Mac OS X would perform its own memory purge after closing an app, but until that happens, there’s always Memory Cleaner.
Memory Cleaner earns 5 out of 5 Bob Weiners.
These beautiful and intelligent people wrote
Tell me what you think!
Christopher Jefferson
May 24, 2011 at 6:37 amNo, this kind of application really isn’t useful. If this app did anything useful, the people at Apple would use the technique. They aren’t stupid.
Memory is often full of things which aren’t immediatly useful, like recently read files and infrequently used bits of programs. That is because we may as well keep them in memory, just in case we need them later.
It is possible to evict all these things from memory if you really want to, but there is no need to. When the operating system needs memory it can clean those pages out.
All benchmarks I have ever seen show that this kind of program actually slows your computer down. Do you have any evidence this helps at all?
James
May 24, 2011 at 6:59 amUmm… What memory are you missing? Inactive Memory listed in dark blue in the Activity Monitor? I’ve got 16GB’s of RAM on a MacPro similar to yours with an OWC SSD 120GB drive. In OS X there is Free, Wired, Active, Inactive, and virtual memory. If this Memory Cleaner is just clearing out the Inactive memory, you can actually do that with a Terminal command called “purge” that is included with the Developer Tools. It pretty much clears the disk cache which is what you are seeing as unreleased inactive memory. This could hurt performance in many cases. The cache is meant to return frequently used data stored in the cache. The disk cache may seem overly aggressive but it’s keeping the GUI at full speed. Typing ‘purge’ in a console will wipe it out in seconds. No need to buy this App unless you like a pretty window that likely just shells out and executes the ‘purge’ command behind it’s curtain.
It may be doing a few other little things like clearing some other caches. But the ‘purge’ command is likely the biggest item impacting you at the moment. I’ve witnessed over half my RAM go dark blue and running the purge clears it quickly. Course with an SSD drive and this much RAM, I rarely have slow downs. I’ve tried to push this rig to the limits and it still keeps cranking pretty dang well! We’re taking 6 VM’s running multiple processes each plus Blender running a multi-threaded render session and it’s still remarkably responsive to launching another app, even when swapping to the SSD. Adobe apps might be increasing the cache quite a bit due to the large file sizes they deal with, etc.
Krishna
May 24, 2011 at 10:11 amI haven’t noticed any performance decrease since using it on both my Macs. and thanks for the heads-up on the purge command, James.
Patrick
May 24, 2011 at 1:18 pmThis memory cleaner does not make your Mac run faster. Simply do a quick before and after test to prove this.
Not convinced? Read http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1342. This is the Apple explanation of memory in OS X.
What these memory cleaners do is flush the “inactive” memory, so that the free memory number goes up. Certain users will look at the increase in free memory and think “great! more memory!”. In fact, the inactive memory had data in it that (after the memory cleaning) now must be reloaded.
Tomska
May 25, 2011 at 12:01 amWow it looks like a utility made by clueless Windows developers who have no idea how MacOS memory works. The motto of MacOS memory management is “free memory is wasted memory”. Purging memory is extremely quick, loading from disc is less so, so MacOS keeps things loaded into memory until something else requires memory and old less used allocations are automatically purged to load the new items. That way if structures in memory need to be used again there is a chance they will already be there. In fact what this utility does is slow the OS down because it will probably have to reload things into memory from disc which could have otherwise already been there.
Anon
May 25, 2011 at 3:56 am“But sometimes the OS doesn’t relinquish the extra RAM, even after the memory-hungry application has quit.” hmm… doesn’t sound like a very good operating system… you should use Windows :P
Leopinheiro
September 13, 2011 at 7:16 pmJames is correct. In fact, not only Mac OS X, but Windows, Linux and every modern operating system works like that. It’s an optimization.
One thing you could do is defrag the RAM. When you defrag it, you make free large chunks of memory. Then, when a program needs to allocate a big continuous chunk of memory, it’s going to find it. But which kind of program needs huge continuous memory space? Maybe some highly specific software.
Leopinheiro
September 13, 2011 at 7:17 pmBTW, I don’t know any Mac software that defrags the RAM. If someone out there knows, please tell me.