Review: Getting Back Memory from OS X - Memory Clean

Ever since I upgraded my Macbook Pro 17" 8GB RAM to OS X Mavericks, I've suffered terrible thefts of available free RAM for actual software and eventually I have not even enough to satisfy System needs. (apparently this issue goes away substantially when having 16 GB of RAM but still, one should be able to run Photoshop as fast as with earlier editions of OS X.

(There's a second issue of unrelenting theft of hard drive space, consuming up much of an attached USB drive, but that I'll deal with subsequently.)

I recommend everyone to try this little app. It doesn't use many resources itself and works like a charm. From having almost all my memory in use with nothing going on except Activity Monitor, this little app delivered back my memory, 5 GB of it, in seconds.




Interestingly, first it gave me just over 4 GB then when I ran it again just to see what happened, it slipped back a further 1.2GB of pilfered RAM!

The wonderful thing is that it actually works and my computer now zips through images in Phase One's Media Pro catalog application and Photoshop has a great boost in speed. The app is on the left edge of the top of OS X tiny icons to the left of the icons for sound volume and the internet connection. Like having a clock for hte time, I see a tiny meter and next to it ""4.35 GB". So if htat number drops, all I have to do is click the icon and another click it cleans up the memory in 10 seconds more.

Even more surprising today, is that it's both free at the Apple App store and there are no popup adds to be annoying! Download ithe app here!

ASHER'S RATING: √√√√√

USEFUL FOR: Recovering wasted RAM gobbled up by later versions of OS X Mac Operating System

Try it, you'll love it too!

Asher

Progress report!

After working with a Sony A7r fil in Photoshop with about 10 layers, the memory went down to almost zilch and then I got it back with the app but it came back gradually and needed a bunch of cycles before I got over 5 GB RAM back. So it seems the the app is pretty cautious and one might get more back with another cycle until one has the limit of recovery. in 3-5 goes. That can take from 15 seconds to 45 seconds a recovery cycle.

I would love an app that works as well, but just does this in b.g. automatically.

Asher

Has anyone other solutions? We need Mavericks to work better in releasing memory. With Phase One's Media Pro, the free RAM quickly decreases to just 6-8 MB, no typo and it get's to appear in red!

Asher

I've discovered a setting in Memory Clean that allows one to set a limit that triggers the app to independently some of the stolen RAM. One cannot assign this limit to be higher than 1638MB, (at least for my 17" MacbookPro late 2011 with 8GB of RAM). So I set it too 600 MB and was able to have AutopanoGiga process a 7 GB pano without crashing but then also opening a 20GB file in Photoshop CC pano crashed it must have starved AutopanoGiga, (and it crashed, of course, LOL. I was loosing my patience having AutoPanoGiga render over 5 hours and wanted to see if the panos I had, already, did the job satisfactorily requiring no further Herculean effort on the poor overtaxed laptop's part!

So perhaps I'll raise the point at which the Memory Clean app by trying to keep at least 1200MB or RAM. It seems that by the time the app gets going, enough free RAM can be gobbled up that AutoPanoGiga can still crash and get beyond rescue.

It should be that when a program crashes, one could go behind the scenes in the Terminal and repair manually whatever is wrong with the system!

I will be looking into tricks people have offered to deal with "kernal_tasks" stealing the RAM, but I think that's only a minor part of the issue as it only gets to be about 600 to 1200 MB of RAM and that doesn't account for all the missing memory. P

A considerable part of the issue is that programs don't seem to be able to efficiently release RAM they use even for a short while. But that is just a non-expert impression. I have really no idea what's actually wrong with OS X Mavericks handling of memory. It just is so frustrating and it sucks!

Asher