I like stuff.

Want to turn Activity Monitor’s “blue” (inactive) memory to “green” (free) on your Mac without closing any programs?

Run Terminal and type:

  $ purge

My memory went from  to  the last time I did this. Not too shabby. (Why did it also clear up some Active Memory? I have no idea.)

That’s all you have to do. It can take up to a minute. While purge is running your system will be slow. After that, with all that free memory, it’ll be zippier than before.

Don’t listen to all the remarkably obnoxious fanboys or official Apple support pages telling you just to leave Inactive Memory alone because it will be freed up quickly if it is needed, or that the system knows better than you do when to free memory. Trust your experience. In my experience it will not and it does not. 

Here is the purge man page:

PURGE(8)                  BSD System Manager's Manual                 PURGE(8)

NAME
     purge -- force disk cache to be purged (flushed and emptied)

SYNOPSIS
     purge

DESCRIPTION
     Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer
     cache for performance analysis. It does not affect anonymous memory that has been
     allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc.

SEE ALSO
     sync(8), malloc(3)

This entry was posted on November 9, 2011 at 9:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.