My Mac is good at not crashing when RAM fills, but I regularly use it with immediate, very noticeable, positive effect on my 16GB machine. It slows down to a crawl at times.
My 32GB machine has no such problems.
This is only when multitasking with apps like Final Cut, XCode, Chrome (bonkers to me that a web browser is in that list) and I know how to avoid it happening, but I prefer to push my machine to work how I want it to and clearing RAM lets me do that.
I was experiencing that too with 16Gb RAM, but in situations that aren’t uncommon for me I experience them with my current 40Gb RAM as well. I currently have six apps open, and two dozen menubar utilities, and 49 tabs open in Brave (most RAM-suspended) and 15 tabs open in Safari. 40Gb RAM installed and this is my current RAM situation:
If I hadn’t auto-suspended those Brave tabs (I’ve got a backlog of 6 unwatched YouTube videos alone that would have eaten up RAM in preload) I’d have been left with less than 4Gb RAM and a lot of data would have been written to disk, which, in combination with reading from disk to retrieve it would have made the Mac decidedly sluggish.
Add in the fact that Chrome and Chromium apps have a tendency to experience memory leaks when used over long periods (and I only restart my Mac every 3 weeks or so) and purging RAM becomes a real necessity if I’m not going to quit and restart apps.
I close Chrome frequently because I hate it, so that must help. I think it is the worst memory and power hog on my Mac (and I use FCP, Xcode, Studio One a lot; Graphic is bad here too) and it makes me sad to think just browsing the web is so unnecessarily bad for the environment.
Unfortunately, Google Sheets is my favourite app.
Ha. I actually live inside four different writing apps.
I find that Chromium apps - Brave, Epic, Vivaldi, etc - are simply faster than Safari and handle most web pages better; for some reason Safari tends to bog down when visiting some websites. But Chromium apps can use any of Chrome’s extensions, and I use a ton of those, ranging from privacy enhancers to ad-blockers, to extensions that customize Reddit and YouTube, to ones that save webpages as epubs, or implement dark mode on pages with a click, or enable right-click on sites that try turning it off, or grabbing RSS feeds, or block tracking pixels in email. Firefox is a quite good browser too but has far fewer useful extensions.
And the built-in ad-blocking in both Mac and iOS versions of Brave (using, from what I understand, the guts of uBlock Origin) is very convenient, especially on iPhone.
Big Sur is supposed to make it easy to translate Chrome extensions for use in Safari, so it will be very interesting to see how things shake out next year.
Out of curiosity, is there anywhere you’ve shared the list of your favorite Chrome extensions? It sounds like you’re more into that ecosystem than most. 
Here’s a portion I listed in another thread:
Here’s just a list of privacy-related extensions:
And I mention another couple here:
By the way, if anyone is looking for a Safari alternative, the Tab Suspender works really well.
Because of its history. CleanMyMac has broken apps in the past, including 1Password and DevonThink.
CMM looks better if it finds more things to purge, and so it tends to be overly-aggressive.
You’d have to be very careful not to have that break your apps over time.
what would you recommend as an alternative to CleanMyMac?
I do not have SetApp but do have a one-time purchase of CleanMyMac, and think it’s worth the cost. I have used it for years and never had any issues.
I tried SetApp when it first came out and found that I didn’t use it enough to warrant the subscription. It was a good way to trial new apps, but most of the apps were useless to me, and the ones I did like were cheap to buy outright.
I’m with you on this; I can’t imagine how this would work. Flushing RAM allocated to caches would make it look as if memory is freed up, but the OS will do that on an as-needed basis by itself. Apps that leak memory can’t have it reclaimed, as the “leaked” memory belongs to the process that’s leaking it. The only way to get that back is kill the process At best you could force it to page out. I supposed you might be able to force garbage collection to occur in apps that are written in languages that use it (Objective-C does, I believe).
I’m curious to know what these programs actually do.
Saving to disk slows down the system, virtual memory slows down the system, period. Writing to disk during pagein/pageout activity slows down the Mac when RAM gets full. Even when you have inactive memory macOS will need to do I/O first to save the data to disk before it can reuse the RAM. MacOS operations in theory meets macOS in reality, and reality wins. The Mac will slow when after it uses up RAM and has to to pageouts/pageins.
Doing a purge forces macOS to clean its RAM cache, doing I/O writes if necessary, then put the pages on the free list. Freeing up RAM is great for starting a new app that needs lots of memory and the app or data it needs has not been accessed recently. And you just consolidated a lot of deferred writes in one disk wake up. The downside is that you of course need to re-load old webpages, which is no biggie for me when the alternative is a slower system.
Right, but no OS I have ever worked with would page out RAM being used for buffers, so force clearing them couldn’t possibly have a tangible benefit.
I suppose, though, that forcing inactive app memory to be paged out would at least make that process happen all at once and predictably. That could benefit a subsequently launched app that has time sensitive operation, so I can see some value there. It’s interesting to think about, for sure.
I experienced repeated slowdowns when using 16Gb RAM, and even with my current 40Gb setup, running multiple apps and dozens of open browser tabs. It’s real, it happens, and purging cache does speed up the system, otherwise I wouldn’t do it.
Hm. That’s surprising, I’ve never had a problem with it.
Clean my Mac is a great app. Its costing me clients who used to call me regularly to help me tube up their Macs.
I use it on all my Apple computers
It seems people might be trading one chunk of their time for another. That is, I click free ram, wait 21 seconds (just tried it), then load my huge program. Whereas if they had just loaded their huge program, it would have taken ten seconds longer, which would have been an eternity. Perhaps the satisfaction of bending the machine to their will, and having the delay on their terms helps them feel better about it.
I think that would certainly have a positive effect on me!
The way you put it makes me think of the times I see people frustrated with a choppy computer continuing to bash at the keyboard and mouse, not realising they are making things worse.
As is often the case, leaving things be for a short time could be all that’s needed.
I will try that next time I feel RAM constrained and see how it works out!
I think it would be worth doing several comparisons. There’s nothing like having data.
Yeah, I think it’s probably a perception thing in some cases, especially if paging interferes with UI operations; I imagine it would feel a lot better to use your computer.
But, as I mentioned above, I can also see that predictably forcing inactive app memory to be paged out prior to a time sensitive app launching (or before starting its time sensitive processing) really could make the difference between a usable result and an unworkable system.