How to free up RAM on Mac

Before we start, a little context. "RAM" stands for Random Access Memory, but you can think of it as your Mac's working desk. Apps it's currently using sit on the desk; everything else is in the filing cabinet (your hard drive). When the desk is full, your Mac slows down because it has to keep shuffling things back and forth.

The fix is to clear the desk. There are a few ways. Most are free, take a minute or two, and don't require any technical knowledge.

Step 1. Quit apps you're not using

The single biggest win, and most people skip it. Closing a window is not the same as quitting the app. macOS keeps the app loaded in memory in case you ask for it again. To actually free its memory, you have to quit.

How: right-click the icon in the Dock, choose Quit. Or click the app to make it active, then press Command-Q.

Pay attention to:

• Google Chrome (the worst offender, often more than 1 GB of memory for ten tabs)
• Slack (often 1 to 2 GB on its own)
• Microsoft Teams (similar)
• Photoshop, Lightroom, Final Cut, Premiere (creative apps you might have left open)
• Spotify, Discord, WhatsApp, Notion (all surprisingly hungry for chat-app sized footprints)

Quit anything you're not actively using right now. You can always relaunch.

Step 2. Restart your Mac

Sounds too simple. It works. macOS holds onto memory for apps you've used recently so they reopen faster, and over a week of use that builds up. A restart wipes the slate.

How: Apple menu › Restart. That's it. Aim for once a week as a habit.

If your Mac has been on for more than a week and feels slow, this alone fixes most of it.

Step 3. Find the memory hog in Activity Monitor

Apple ships a free tool that shows exactly what's using your memory. It's called Activity Monitor, and it's already on your Mac.

How:

1. Press Command-Space to open Spotlight.
2. Type "Activity Monitor", press Return.
3. Click the Memory tab at the top.
4. Click the Memory column header to sort the list by memory use, biggest first.

Whatever's at the top is your memory hog. If you don't need it running, click it once to select, then click the small octagonal stop-sign button in the toolbar (top-left), and choose Force Quit.

Be careful: don't force-quit anything labelled "kernel_task", "WindowServer", "loginwindow", or anything you don't recognise that's small. Those are macOS itself. Stick to apps you launched.

While you're here, also check the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom. (See what memory pressure means.) Green means you're fine. Yellow means working hard. Red means actually struggling.

Step 4. Turn off background apps that auto-start

Every time you turn on your Mac, dozens of apps quietly launch in the background. Adobe updaters, Google Drive, Dropbox, Spotify, Microsoft AutoUpdate, printer software, plus whatever else you installed and forgot. Each one quietly uses memory forever.

How:

1. Open System Settings (Apple menu › System Settings).
2. Click General in the sidebar.
3. Click Login Items & Extensions.
4. You'll see two lists: Open at Login (apps that launch when you log in) and Allow in the Background (apps that quietly run even when you don't need them).
5. Toggle off anything you don't recognise or don't need running constantly.

Most of these are safe to disable. If something stops working, you can re-enable it later. Common safe-to-disable items: Adobe updaters, printer companion apps, downloaded-and-forgot apps from years ago, anything by a vendor you don't remember.

Step 5. Free up disk space

Memory and disk space sound unrelated, but they're not. When your hard drive is more than 90 percent full, macOS struggles to use the small amount of disk-based "swap" memory it leans on when RAM is tight. The whole system gets slower as a side effect.

How:

1. Open Apple menu › About This Mac.
2. Click More Info, then scroll to Storage Settings.
3. macOS will show you what's using your disk and suggest what to remove (large files, unused apps, downloads, etc.).

Aim for at least 10 percent of your disk free; 20 percent is comfortable. The biggest wins are usually old downloads (the Downloads folder), forgotten video files, and apps you installed once and never used.

Step 6. (Optional) Use a one-click memory tool

If you'd rather not do steps 1, 3, and 4 manually each time, a small menu-bar app does the same job in one click. Shiny is the one I make. It closes orphaned helper processes (the small bits of an app that don't shut down properly when you quit), asks macOS to release inactive memory, and pauses apps that have been idle for hours and are still holding RAM. $4.99 once, no subscription, no popups telling you your Mac is in danger.

Disclosure: I make Shiny, so I'm biased. The manual steps above are free and work. If you find yourself doing them more than once a week, a $4.99 one-click button might be worth it.

What does ‘sudo purge’ actually do?

You'll see this Terminal command recommended in older Mac articles. It tells macOS to release the cached parts of memory it's still holding "just in case". It's safe to run, but the dramatic numbers some articles claim are exaggerated, especially on Apple Silicon Macs (M1, M2, M3, M4) where macOS already releases memory aggressively on its own.

If you want to try it: open Terminal (Command-Space, type "Terminal"), type sudo purge, press Return, type your password, press Return again. Most users won't notice a difference. We've written a longer post measuring exactly what it does on Apple Silicon: see Jonathan Levin's deep dive on memory pressure for the technical version.