How To Clear Inactive Memory in MacOSX

Published Date Author: , Posted August 9th, 2013 at 5:12:19pm

Open Terminal and run the purge command, located in /usr/bin/.

Note: You may need to have XCode Developer Tools installed in order to use the purge command. YMMV…

As per Apple:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342

Inactive Memory:

This information is in RAM but it is not actively being used, it was recently used.

For example, if you’ve been using Mail and then quit it, the RAM that Mail was using is marked as Inactive memory. Inactive memory is available for use by another application, just like Free memory. However, if you open Mail before its Inactive memory is used by a different application, Mail will open quicker because its Inactive memory is converted to Active memory, instead of loading it from the slower drive.

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