iCreate - UK (2021-07)

Step-by-step

macOS Memoryproblems

Memory-

boosting apps

If your Mac is often short of memory, causing
performance issues or even paused apps
in severe cases, uninstalling rarely used
software helps. Remove any app that is not
needed. It is usually not a good idea to install
more apps, but we know two that can help
with the memory issues. Funter (nektony.
com) and Maintenance (titanium-software.
fr) are both useful tools that work in different
ways. Both are free, so add them to your Mac
to clean up and tune up.

Funter and Maintenance

Monitor memory

Check for memory issues in Activity Monitor

1

Free up memory

Funter adds a menu bar icon. Click it to

see memory used and total memory. Click the

‘Cleanup’ button to free up memory. Do this

before running an app to give it more memory

and improve its performance.

Memory clean-up apps

Are memory optimiser apps the answer

to memoryproblems? Yesand no.The

Mac optimises memory by compressing

it and saving rarely accessed parts to the

disk. An optimiser increases this activity.

It frees up memory for the next app you

run, but currently, open apps may slow

down because their memory needs to be

loaded when you switch to them.

Knowledge base

2

Disk cleanup

The disk is an extension of memory and

performance suffers when there is little space.

Run Maintenance every month or two to clean

caches, logs, junk and other temporary files

you won’t miss. It frees up space and memory.

Show memory hogs

Open Activity Monitor, select

the ‘Memory’ tab and then

click the ‘Memorycolumn to

sort everything by size. See

which apps are using the most

memory and quit themto free

up memory.

Memory pressure

This live scrolling chart shows

how well the Mac is coping

with apps’ memory usage. The

red peak shows that this Mac

briefly ran out of memory for

running apps. Large red areas

are serious.

RAM installed vs used

Here is the total amount of memory

installed. Below is the amount of

memory used, cached and written

to the swap file. Install more RAM if

possible, but if not, you should reduce

the apps installed and running.

Memory usage

This box breaks

down memoryusage.

‘Compressed’ memory and

‘Swap Used’ are slower to

access than normal memory,

and large numbers mean

poor performance. Quit apps

to free up memory.