Memory Pig Mac OS

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Few things are more frustrating than your Mac telling you it has run out of memory when you're trying to be productive. It's more frustrating when you've ignored the problem for quite some time and your Mac's limitations simply won't let you put a solution on hold any longer.

  • How to get rid of low memory notifications

About the Virtual Memory System. Efficient memory management is an important aspect of writing high performance code in both OS X and iOS. Minimizing memory usage not only decreases your application’s memory footprint, it can also reduce the amount of CPU time it consumes.

Usually, a popup warning isn't the first sign that something is amiss. You may have noticed that your Mac isn't running as fast as it used to, with the fan louder than normal as if it's struggling to carry a heavy load up a hill.

  • Below is a screenshot of Activity Monitor on mac os. I wonder what command line I can use to get the memory usage. I tried below command: $ top -l 1 -n 0 Processes: 399 total, 3 running, 396 sleep.
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  • This is the entire premise of Memory Clean 2.8 (Mac App Store link), Fiplabs’ free memory utility designed to purge inactive memory to help free it up for later use.

Although Macs are wonderful computers, they have limitations. Thankfully, there is plenty you can do to resolve this problem and get your Mac operating smoothly again.

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Your system has run out of application memory - Fix it

Mac memory usage is often occupied by apps, even browsers like Safari or Google Chrome. In the most dire circumstances, your Mac will toss a warning at you: 'your system has run out of application memory.'

Don't despair – it's solvable. The first thing to note is this is a natural issue; your Mac has a limited amount of RAM. Though more expensive Macs have more RAM, even they can butt against limitations when too many applications are running.

It may also be an app that is hogging all of your resources. This is especially true of older applications which haven't been optimized for modern computer architecture. Websites may also be a culprit.

Check RAM usage on Mac

To check your RAM use on any Mac, take the following steps:

  1. Open Activity Monitor from your list of applications
    Note: You can do this is the Mac's control center, via the Finder in your Mac's dock, or by pressing command-space and typing 'Activity Monitor' in the Spotlight search field.
  2. Toggle to the 'Memory' pane in the Activity Monitor window

As you see in the above screenshot, Activity Monitor shows you all of your processes, sub-processes, and how much memory each is taking up. The most pertinent portion of the window is the bottom, where it shows you the total memory usage, and how it's affecting your Mac.

A better way to monitor your Mac's memory use is with iStat Menus. After installing the app, it makes a home in your Mac's menu bar, and monitors just about everything, including memory, CPU, GPU, disks, and network usage.

You can choose which systems you'd like to monitor in the app itself. Only the items you're monitoring will have an icon in your menu bar. A simple click on the menu bar icon surfaces a drop-down menu of how your Mac is performing at the time, and hovering over each graphic brings up a larger menu, as you can see below.

How to check CPU usage on Mac

Checking CPU use on your Mac is similar to the steps above for checking memory use. For Activity Monitor, you'd make sure to highlight the 'CPU' section of the window. This will show you all the processes using your Mac's CPU at the time.

Similarly, iStat Menus has a 'CPU & GPU' toggle just above the memory section. Activating that will add a CPU and GPU monitor to your Mac menu bar, which has the same interactivity as the memory icon and menu shown above.

How to free up memory on Mac

Knowing how to clear memory on Mac is important, especially if you have a Mac with limited resources. One option is using Activity Monitor:

  1. Open Activity Monitor on your Mac
  2. Select an app using a lot of memory
  3. Click the 'x' icon on the top left of the screen
Memory pig mac os x

This is straightforward, but there's a better way. CleanMyMac X has an automated CPU and memory monitors built-in, which can give you a real-time view of memory usage in your Mac's menu bar. It also has a really quick and easy way to free up memory without digging through Activity Monitor and manually shutting down apps.

All you have to do is click the CleanMyMac X icon, select 'Free Up' in the memory pane, and the app takes care of the rest! Oftentimes, it doesn't even shut apps down.

This is a quick fix, but CleanMyMac X takes it a step further in the app itself. Under the app's 'Maintenance' section is an option to 'Free Up RAM,' which helps you clear RAM on Mac. Once you've got this option selected, simply select 'Run' at the bottom of the window, and CleanMyMac X will do a thorough scrubbing of your Mac's RAM, and clear unused files out of the way.

How to get rid of low memory notifications

Most apps are pretty good about how they use your Mac's resources. Having too many open or running in the background can severely limit what your Mac can handle, and is often why a Mac overheats or slows down.

Here are a few tips to reduce high memory usage manually if you're experiencing unique warnings or issues:

Fix 'kernel_task', a high CPU usage bug

You may have noticed through Activity Monitor something called kernel_task absorbing a large amount of processing power. One of the functions of kernel_task is to help manage CPU temperature; you may find that your Mac fan is loud and always on, even if the device isn't hot to the touch.

kernel_task usually performs this way when one or more applications are trying to use too much CPU. Unfortunately, one of the potential downsides is a Mac can overheat to such an extent that internal systems are damaged, sometimes irreparably.

Working through the following steps in this article is one way to avoid similar problems. If none of this work and kernel_task is still absorbing a high percentage of your CPU, then one or more of the following could be the cause:

  • Cooling system inefficiency
  • A failed or disconnected temperature sensor
  • Another hardware issue, including a worn out batter
  • Your System Management Controller needs a rest

If you're experiencing severe issues, Apple recommends a system management controller (SMC) reset. It's essentially a hard reset for your Mac, and should help your RAM and other hardware components start from scratch. Keep in mind you won't lose any data in this process.

Reduce memory usage in Finder

One common culprit for RAM issues is Finder, your Mac's file manager. If iStat Menus or Activity Monitor has highlighted Finder as using hundreds of MBs of RAM, there is an easy solution: change the default display for a new Finder window so it doesn't show All My Files.

  1. Click on the Finder icon in the Dock and click on the Finder menu, then select Preferences
  2. Click on General. Under 'New Finder windows show', click the dropdown menu and choose any option except All My Files
  3. Close Preferences, press Alt-Control, and click on the Finder icon in the Dock. Click Relaunch

Finder will now relaunch with new windows opening at the option you selected in step two.

Improve Chrome's Task Manager

Chrome is a popular browser, but it's a resources hog! Chrome uses a GPU Process as standard, which means it speeds up the loading of web pages, which can be great except at times when your computer is struggling with insufficient RAM.

Here's how:

  1. Open Chrome on your Mac
  2. On the right side of the Chrome window, select the three-dot menu
  3. Select 'More tools'
  4. Select 'Task Manager'
  5. Select a Chrome process you'd like to kill
  6. Select 'End Process' at the bottom right of the window

Here's another way to reduce Chrome's use of your Mac's memory:

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  1. Open Chrome on your Mac
  2. On the right side of the Chrome window, select the three-dot menu
  3. Select 'settings'
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select 'advanced'
  5. Scroll down to 'System,' and toggle 'Use hardware acceleration when available' off

This will affect how Chrome runs on your Mac, and your experience won't be as smooth. You can also remove unused or unwanted Chrome extensions to help it use less resources on your Mac.

Get CMM X to free up space

Install CleanMyMac X and streamline the entire process of memory management on Mac. Clever memory usage control done for you.

Clean up browsers

In every browser you use regularly, there are always going to be extensions and popups that take up space and use RAM. You can manage each one manually, or use a tool such as CleanMyMac X to identify and delete them.

In the CleanMyMac X app is a section titled 'Extensions,' which lists each extension you have for your browser or browsers. All you have to do is view the list of extensions, select the ones you no longer want, and remove them. It's really that simple!

Disable login items

Login items, browser extensions, and preference panes, such as Flash, are another common source of memory usage. Most of us have several installed that we rarely use, but which hog memory and reduce performance.

One way to do this is through System Preferences:

  1. From your Mac menu bar, select 'System Preferences'
  2. Select 'Users & Groups'
  3. Select 'login items'
  4. Deselect items you no longer want active at login

Another way, one that is even quicker, is to employ CleanMyMac to identify and cleanup login items.

  1. Open CleanMyMac X
  2. Under 'Speed,' select 'Optimization'
  3. Select 'login items'

You can remove all login items, or select the ones you'd like to remove individually on the right side of the window.

Disable desktop widgets

Older Macs running a version of macOS older than Catalina can disable widgets. Desktop widgets can provide a useful shortcut to apps you need to access fairly often. But they can take up processing memory that is slowing your whole Mac down. One way to close them completely is in System Preferences.

Go to: Mission Control > switch off the Dashboard

Declutter your desktop

Apple's built in decluttering tool is handy for many. All you have to do on your cluttered desktop is right-click, then select 'Use Stacks.' This places all of your desktop files into folders unique to their filetype, like 'screenshots' and 'images.'

Memory Pig Mac Os Download

A better way is to use Spotless, an app that gives you far more control over how your Mac is organized. It has several triggers for automated cleanup of files on your desktop, placing them wherever you see fit. It's particularly useful for power users who produce several files daily, but don't want to take the time to place each in a respective folder.

You can also select many files on your Mac desktop, and tell Spotless to tidy them up. You always have full control!

Schedule regular cleanups

Constant use of your Mac, or leaving it on all the time, will slow it down over time. Shutting it down and restarting is a traditional way of 'cleaning up' a computer.

We also like CleanMyMac X's scheduled cleanup feature. Telling the app when you'd like to perform a thorough cleaning up of your Mac's system is a method many prefer to shutting down and restarting often. It has the upshot of removing files and folders you no longer use, and cleaning up tasks that are slowing your Mac down behind the scenes. A simple shutdown may not do this.

Keeping your Mac in tip-top shape is critical. While we'd all like to think computers are brilliant little devices that can handle anything, they need some care, too.

All of the apps mentioned in this article help with taking care of your Mac, and protecting your investment. Best of all they're each free as part of a seven day trial of Setapp. Give it a try today!

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Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space

If you have a limited amount of either RAM (memory) or available — free or unused — space on your Mac® OS X startup disk, you may encounter problems including kernel panics, the inability to burn CDs or DVDs, or the apparent loss of application preferences.

This FAQ, which is derived from a chapter from our book Troubleshooting Mac OS X, describes the basis of these problems and solutions for such.

Memory management in Mac OS X

Applications and processing on your Mac require physical RAM to work. The more applications you launch or the larger the files those applications work upon, the more physical RAM is consumed.

To efficiently use your available RAM, Mac OS X employs a strategy common to all modern operation systems known as Virtual Memory (VM). For a detailed technical discussion of VM management in Mac OS X, see the 'Memory Management in Mac OS X' chapter of theApple® Developer Connection document Memory Usage Performance Guidelines.

Paging is a key activity of VM. Paging involves copying data between RAM and special files on your Mac OS X startup disk known as swap files. The use of swap files gives the appearance of the system having more RAM than is physically installed. Paging involves page-outs and page-ins:

  • To free RAM for other applications and processing, data is copied from RAM to a swap file. This is known as a page-out.
  • When you switch to an application whose memory has been paged-out to a swap file, Mac OS X performs a page-in, copying the application's memory image from the swap file back into RAM.

The degree to which Mac OS X relies on VM depends on how much RAM you have installed and how much of that RAM is available, i.e. not currently in use. Paging increases with physical RAM use: the more RAM in use, the more paging may be employed as you launch applications or open documents.

Swap files are created and released dynamically and are saved in the /private/var/vm directory. However, the ability for Mac OS X to create a swap file depends on your Mac having free space on the Mac OS X startup disk.

Depending upon the load you are placing upon your system — the number of applications running concurrently, the number and sizes of files each application is working upon, and other factors — it is technically possible to exhaust both your Mac's physical RAM and the free space on the startup disk that is available for swap files.

Problems from lack of RAM or hard disk space

Problems arising from insufficient RAM or available hard disk space include:

  • Slow performance.
  • Kernel panics.
  • Inability to:
    • Burn CDs or DVDs.
    • Start the Classic environment.
    • Install software, either via Software Update or using third-party installers.
    • Reinstall Mac OS X via Archive and Install .
    • Enable or disable FileVault®.
  • 'Lost' application preferences. The reason for this perplexing situation is as follows:
    • Many applications update their preferences when the application is launched. These updates, and any changes you make to the application's Preferences while using it, are preserved by writing the changes to the application's preferences file on the hard disk. Applications also include Mac OS X components such as Finder™ and the Dock.
    • When your hard disk is almost full, it may be impossible for the application to save its updated preferences. This may result in a situation where you find the preferences for an application appear to have been reset to their default values. For example, you may lose all your Dock settings. This can also result in some applications failing to launch in future.

These problems are even more likely to occur when the startup disk was nearly full to begin with, physical RAM is exhausted, and free disk space is consumed by swap files.

To avoid these problem, it is necessary to minimize the potential impact of page-outs by either increasing RAM, available space on the startup disk, or both.

Determining if your system is at risk

You determine if your system is at risk of experiencing the problems above by checking both the available space on your Mac OS X startup disk and how much paging your system is performing.

Determine the available space on your Mac OS X startup disk

  1. In Finder®, select the startup disk icon. For most users, this is Macintosh HD.
  2. Press the Command-I keyboard shortcut.
  3. The Info window for your startup disk opens. In the General pane, the Capacity, Available (free space), and space Used on your startup disk is displayed, as seen in the following screen shot:
  • As a general rule of thumb: if the Available space on the Mac OS X startup disk is less than 10 GB, it is time to free some disk space. We suggest 10 GB as an absolute minimum as this is generally the amount of free space required to reinstall Mac OS X 10.5 and earlier via an Archive and Install and still preserve space for VM swap files. More free space is better. For example, users of FileVault may want to retain more free space than that occupied by their encrypted Home folder: disabling FileVault requires free space somewhat greater than the size of your encrypted Home folder.

Determine how much paging your system is performing

  1. Open Terminal, located in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder.
  2. At the prompt, type top and press Return.
  3. Examine the output generated by top. For example:
  • Processes: 65 total, 3 running, 1 stuck, 61 sleeping, 319 threads 09:54:54
    Load Avg: 0.01, 0.09, 0.13 CPU usage: 3.12% user, 0.96% sys, 95.91% idle
    SharedLibs: 4164K resident, 15M data, 0B linkedit.
    MemRegions: 17316 total, 1222M resident, 22M private, 676M shared.
    PhysMem: 481M wired, 2204M active, 1284M inactive, 3970M used, 2165M free.
    VM: 152G vsize, 1043M framework vsize, 125745(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts.
    Networks: packets: 192696/233M in, 132174/21M out.
    Disks: 71776/2296M read, 168331/2806M written.

At then end of the PhysMem(Physical Memory) line, we see that the Mac in this example has 6 GB of RAM (3,970 MB used + 2,165 MB free = 6,135 MB = 6 GB).

Now note the pageins and pageouts in the last or VM (virtual memory) line:

The numbers before the parentheses, 125745 and 0 in this example, indicate the total pageins and pageouts, respectively, performed since this Mac was last restarted. Over time, both numbers will increase. If the total pageouts is low — ideally 0 — compared to the number of pageins after having used your Mac for hours of work, you may have sufficient RAM. Otherwise, you should install more RAM.

The numbers within the parentheses are the most important: these indicate the number of pageins or pageouts performed in the last one second. If these values — especially pageouts — are consistently in the range of 25 to 50 or more, then the system is thrashing: paging excessively as it is starved for RAM at its current workload. Overall performance will slow as the CPU spends more time paging than on other work. If your Mac is thrashing, you need to install more RAM!

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With 6 GB of RAM, there are 0(0) pageouts, both since the last restart and in the last one second. If this Mac had 2 GB of RAM instead of 6 GB, then the number of pageouts would be higher since the current physical RAM in use is 3.97 GB. Recall that RAM use increases with every additional open application or document. If this Mac had 2 GB of RAM and we opened many applications and documents, the number of pageouts, both total and on a per-second basis, would be significantly higher. Depending on the mix of open applications and documents, with just 2 GB of RAM, thrashing could result.

However, even with a large complement of RAM, such as the 6 GB in this example, pageouts and pageins can be high with very processor-intensive activities, such as video playback or compression. Therefore, the numbers in parentheses — pages in or out per second — are the most critical in determining when thrashing is occurring and if more RAM is critically required.

To quit the top application, press the Control-C keyboard shortcut in Terminal. To end the Terminal Session, press the Control-D keyboard shortcut, then Quit (Command-Q) Terminal.

Upgrade to permanently resolve the problems

The only permanent solution to avoiding these problems is to install any or all of the following, assuming your Mac will accept such:

  • Additional RAM, preferably up to the limit your Mac will accept.
  • A larger hard drive for the Mac OS X startup disk.
  • For a Mac desktop, an additional internal hard drive for your data files, if feasible.

To avoid these problems while considering your upgrade options:

  • Run as few applications concurrently as possible.
  • Follow the advice in our 'Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk' FAQ to increase the available space on your Mac OS X startup disk.

Related links

  • Tuning Mac OS X Performance.