The total memory used is App Memory + Wired Memory, which is 1.59GB + 585.1MB or about 2.18GB. The Wired Memory figure is also apps and macOS memory usage, (important memory not to be messed with).

The App memory is the amount of memory used by apps that are running. Look at the right-hand side of the table in Activity Monitor. Subtracting the memory used from the physical memory does not tell you how much memory is free. The problem is that this figure is wrong. There is a slight difference in MB, but that’s because the memory free has changed a little when I ran Memory Clean.

The Memory Clean utility from the Mac App Store confirms this: Subtract one from the other and the amount of free memory is therefore 0.34GB or 340MB. This looks straightforward and in the left column it says that the physical memory is 4.00GB and the memory used is 3.66GB. This is Yosemite, but macOS Sierra is almost identical Select the memory tab at the top and down at the bottom of the window is a table containing various figures showing how OS X is using the RAM in your Mac. Go to the Applications/Utilities folder and run Activity Monitor. All recent versions of macOS and OS X have used similar memory handling for years and not much has changed. They are very popular apps, but do you really need a memory cleaner? What does it do?įirst, you need to understand how the Mac handles memory. Go to the Mac App Store, go to Categories, select Utilities and among the free and paid apps are several memory cleaners.

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