If you’re not comfortable working with the command line in Terminal, you should restart your Mac once per day and you’ll be good. Macs are designed to go weeks and months without restarting but I still shut down my computer at the end of the day and restart it in the morning as doing so prompts macOS to empty out everything in the RAM and clear all the disk caches. You can resolve the slowdowns with or without rebooting. Follow along with iDB as we teach you how to manually force macOS to clear out the RAM and flush the disk caches. macOS also periodically flushes the system caches, but sometimes caches may not be properly emptied.Įither way, this will cause your machine to start stuttering and exhibiting signs of reduced performance such as longer app load times and slower multitasking. SSD replacement kits like OWC’s new Aura Pro X2 can easily double the performance of an older Mac.īut sometimes macOS’s memory management may fail to purge loaded content from the RAM, straining resources. This is by design-as a rule of thumb, the RAM wants to be packed to the gills all the time because loading content from storage is slower than fetching from the RAM. MacOS’s memory management works pretty well-most of the time, the Activity Monitor app shows the RAM as being nearly 100 percent utilized.

Like all multitasking operating systems, macOS dynamically manages the RAM on your behalf so that you’re able to run more apps at the same time than fit into it. When you open an app, its binary gets loaded from storage into the RAM so that the CPU can fetch and execute code. Over time, your Mac can start performing slower than usual due to the accumulated cruft clogging up the system, including temporary files, various caches, streaming data and so forth.Īside from low disk space, the RAM (or lack of it) is the second major cause of slowdowns.

How to free up ram on mac