Daily App: Memory Clean Can Speed Up Yosemite

If you're among the many who've had performance issues since instaling Apple's latest Mac OS X update, then FIPLAB's Memory Clean might help speed up Yosemite. Recognized by Apple as an "invaluable utility," the free tool scans system memory and purges inactive RAM to make it available for other apps and processes. Memory Clean can be used as needed, or set to scan automatically based on a configurable memory threshold.

Like a configurable garbage collector, Memory Clean scans memory at regular intervals and tidies up unused RAM. What's interesting is how large those unused portions can be. For example, our 4-GB test system was configured to schedule a sweep whenever available memory dipped below 25 MB (the system default). After cleaning, the available memory routinely soared to 800 MB or higher. Whenever the customizable threshold is reached, the app's status bar text turns red and, if configured accordingly, Auto Clean can be invoked as often as every three minutes.

We tested Memory Clean version 4.8 on Mac OS X 10.10.1 Yosemite, on which it appeared to work flawlessly. This version occupies just 4.7 MB of disk space and provides an option to start at login, hide at startup, show its Dock icon, display available memory as a percentage, keep the app's status bar icon visible, and adjust the size and presence of its status bar text. Advanced options allow setting of the memory threshold, toggling the auto clean feature and disabling of the interval between auto clean attempts, which the app dialog warns is not recommended.

As of this writing, Memory Clean was the ninth most frequently downloaded app overall in the U.S., according to App Annie's Top Free Apps for Mac OS X.

PUBLISHED JAN. 9, 2015