Memory scrubber

I think you'll find that the overwhelming consensus here is to avoid MacKeeper, and anything related to it, like the plaque.

It has been called, not entirely jokingly, a piece of malware.

I'm sure others with more detailed knowledge will be along to comment.

 

Omg, I've done more to clean my mac from having to see mac cleaner ads than mac cleaner software could ever do. Avoid at all costs.

 

Doesn't this just purge your RAM which could easily be done in terminal anyway?

 

Please forgive the ignorance of the question, but since there is a discussion of Ram I thought I'd take the opportunity to bother you so I might learn some stuff.

Why would it be necessary to purge RAM. My limited understanding is that when RAM is full, it "pages out" to make space available. What is gained in a RAM purge?

Thanks...

 

I've been using Cocktail for at least 5 years.

Great program. No malware and it has a nice GUI front-end for the tools.

 

Thanks, maflynn, for taking the time to give me a bit more education on my computer.

 

If you want to scrub your ram here's a good little app you can get in the app store for free.

http://www.rockysandstudio.com/apps/freememory

 

Thanks for mentioning this. I've previously been using icleanmemory since 2011, but I like this; it seems more current.

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I don't think this does what you think it does:

 

OP has Snow Leopard, and that FreeMemory app won't help the OP. The app requires Lion (OS X 10.7) or higher. And, if you have 10.7 or higher, you have the purge command to easily use, rather than installing some random app that purports to provide access to a service that the system already provides.

 

MacKeeper is malware and a virus

 

It does a fine job of freeing up a fair amount of memory which was being used by FS cache, something that will happen with people opening large files (Videos, photos, etc).

Between running "purge" and exiting/restarting apps that have known problems with memory leaks (Firefox is a great example) it's possible to reclaim multiple gigs of memory.

All that is moot if you still have tons of free memory, though.