"Window Washer" type program for Mac?

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I remember all my past Windows computers having my computer wiz friend installing Webroot's Window Washer on them to run every day or so to "clean up" the memory. He said it frees up alot of wasted memory running it on a regular basis. So what I'm wondering,do they make this type of product for Mac?
 
A lot of that "wasted memory" was processes and data being cached in order to speed the system up. That data is trivially swapped out if it is ever needed by anything else. Clearing it out and having nothing occupy that memory is the only thing that truly consigns the memory to being "wasted"!

Neither MacOS nor Linux et al. really need much in the way of memory or file system maintenance.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
A lot of that "wasted memory" was processes and data being cached in order to speed the system up. That data is trivially swapped out if it is ever needed by anything else. Clearing it out and having nothing occupy that memory is the only thing that truly consigns the memory to being "wasted"!

Neither MacOS nor Linux et al. really need much in the way of memory or file system maintenance.


Exactly
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So is something like this not beneficial?

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400840,00.asp
 
Originally Posted By: aquariuscsm
So is something like this not beneficial?

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400840,00.asp



Not nearly as useful a utility as it is for Windows.
 
Not even very beneficial for Windows, unless you're actually trying to solve some kind of infection.

A system that's running well doesn't need it, and a system that's not running well is probably infected by something and needs more help than these utilities.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted By: Subdued
Not even very beneficial for Windows, unless you're actually trying to solve some kind of infection.

A system that's running well doesn't need it, and a system that's not running well is probably infected by something and needs more help than these utilities.


It's a useful utility on Windows because it allows you to:

- Remove/disable items from startup
- Remove/disable scheduled tasks
- Remove/disable browser add-ons for all major browsers
- Remove the plethora of temp files Windows tends to leave around

I find it a good tool, I just don't use the Registry cleaner part of it. For the other purposes it's a nice single point of access for all of the above functions and puts them in a decent GUI.
 
OS X macOS is quite efficient at memory management, and as said you don't really need to worry about it.

Along with other *nix OSs, it works on the philosophy that "unused memory is wasted memory" so it will tend to shift processes to otherwise unused RAM.

In recent versions of OS X/macOS(starting at 10.9) if you go into Activity Monitor, look at the memory tab. There is a graph at the bottom called "memory pressure." As long as it's green, you're fine.

Also, if you do have a burning desire to clear RAM you can open Terminal and type "sudo purge"(without the quotes) and hit enter. It will prompt you for your password(system password-you won't see anything appear on the screen as you type) and will clear out unused memory. Since about 10.10, the value of doing this has been questionable at best. My preferred browser is Firefox, and it's known for memory leaks. I tend to keep sessions open for a long time(basically I only close and reopen it when performance issues start hindering my utility) and I will occasionally execute a purge command in 10.12 for this reason. If you don't use Firefox, or if you do and close it every few days this isn't an issue.
 
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