How Much Memory For Os X Sierra Free Some Up

How Much Memory For Os X Sierra Free Some Up

Although you can install more or free some up by quitting some running programs, first it may help to analyze how much RAM your programs actually are using.

Allocating virtual memory to a program allows the system to swap RAM contents to the hard drive and otherwise manage memory in useful ways.

When a file is first read, its contents are stored in virtual memory and its blocks are copied to the cache, so when the system writes to the file it has the option to do so in the cache rather than waiting for the slower hard drive.

At a later point a separate process synchronizes the modified blocks in the cache with their respective ones on disk.

However, though clearing the disk cache wont improve performance, it will prevent it from being included in memory measurements and therefore help you find out how much RAM your programs and system processes are truly using.

This command will take a few moments in which it will stress the virtual memory system to unload cached disk blocks and free them up, and in doing so will appear to reduce the overall memory usage of the system.

When its done, the resulting memory usage by the system should better indicate how much memory your applications and system services are actually using, similar to the levels they used when the system was first booted.

Rather, as Ive mentioned in the past about other memory cleaner utilities, once you clear the disk cache or otherwise stress the virtual memory system to free up physical RAM, it will slowly begin to equalize and will soon return to its prior RAM usage levels.

Therefore, instead of using the purge command or other memory management tools to free RAM, it may be best to reserve these for determining programs memory footprints and thereby isolating problems such as memory leaks, or determining if programs themselves are to blame for high RAM usage.

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