The app ifreemem does something like this.

No, it's not. I'm not trying to be mean, but this doesn't even make sense.

yeah i was trying to be really simple, and put it into a real world application that someone would do constantly...

i failed

And you didn't really read the thread. :(

And what part of this did I miss read?

The thread is more than a single question asked by the OP.

I did not see you or anyone else answer this part of compulsive's question. Is it not the goal to answer the questions? Yes I see there is more to the thread its pretty obvious.

I think modern memory management could be likened to a professional sports game. In a sport the goal is to score, so a sport newbie would see all the players taking various positions that don't seem to have anything to do with the goal and say "Why don't they just go to the goal? What is that guy doing way out there? How come that one basketball player stands still while his teammate heads straight for him?"

But the sports veteran would recognize all of the positioning and setup that has everything to do with anticipating upcoming situations before, when, and after the ball moves toward the goal, ready to take advantage of all the opportunities and also to head off all of the potential traps. The coach is like your OS. It really does know better than you do. If you try to do the obvious, the other team will cream you. If you instead execute plays that have been battle-tested to be fast, efficient, powerful, reliable, and secure, your team will do well. OS X has years of professional RAM "coaching" experience behind it thanks to Unix. I do not believe in apps like iFreeMem.

After reading that rather brief product description on the Activata iFreeMem product page, I am still at a loss to describe what the application does that the OS doesn't already do automatically? Isn't part of the system memory managers job to reduce "memory fragmentation" (as Activata puts it)? I don't see how this software can do what would otherwise require a "reboot or RAM upgrade". I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that this is crapware!

I have nothing to do with this program and do not even use it but how can you just call it crapware? Do you know for a fact that it does nothing? It seems to me that if it releases all the memory in cache (like it says it does) then osx starts to re-assigning memory to the cache that this may be beneficial in some instances. For instance, you may have had 15 apps open all day and then want to start a recording session. It would make sense to release all the memory cache and then let osx rebuild them with the apps you are working with now.

I also think that osx would eventually do this on its own but the OP asked for an "instant" solution. Hence the suggestion and comment.

Now, does it work? I have no idea but then again I am not a osx programer. I would leave it up to other people that may need this service to decide if it works. I have to trust that the developer knows what he is doing and offers legitimate software.

I notice now that there is a note on the developers website that 10.5 users really will not benefit from the software. Again, would someone post that if they were just trying to get your 10 bucks or whatever it costs?

I am highly doubtful that this problem is useful in the sense of increasing the overall performance of your Mac. One string reason to be dubious is that otherwise you are believing that some application developer has a magic trick that fixes something so that it works better than what Apple's kernel engineers can do.

I note that my "VMTester" utility (free and open-source!) has an option to run a command to consolidate RAM. I am highly doubtful that such a command increases performance. Yes, it might result in your machine being faster later, but you need to factor in the time that you spend running that command. The system would have done the same thing (consolidation) in its own time when RAM is needed.

hayne, I agree with you completely on several of your points.

However, Pitting kernel engineers against an independent software developer is a bit over the top.

I think a clever developer could probably change or manipulate the memory management temporarily to give the results that this developer claims.

I really don't think its a magic trick. It is probably known by many people that are intimately familiar with the osx memory model.

Its the same thing as being inside a chemical lab that produces cool high end plastics or such. There are those that know exactly how the plastics are made. There are other chemical engineers that can figure it out and reproduce it. There are still other people that can figure out what you did and exploit it to do something a little different.

Sorry, but it sounds like crap to me, too. I, like Hayne, have a hard time believing that this magical shareware app is better at freeing memory than Mac OS X's kernel engineers. It just doesn't make any sense.

Even from a cost-benefit point of view, it's crap. This thing is 10 pounds. As of this post, that's about $20. That's half the price of a physical RAM upgrade, practically. If you're having memory problems, why not just buy more RAM at that point?

Calling "ripoff".

I don't think you understand how Mac OS X memory management works.

I'd say it's exactly the core of the matter.

Nope, I don't and I think I made that perfectly clear with this statement:


Agian as I said before:
I also think that osx would eventually do this on its own but the OP asked for an "instant" solution.

Is this justification for calling a program crapware?

I didn't call it crapware by the way. I said "I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that this is crapware!" That's my guess from what I know of memory management. Mikey-San and hayne know more than me, to be sure, so I will leave it to them to correct me if I misrepresent something below.

The criticism I have of this app and its alleged usefulness is this:

1. iFreeMem developers claim to "recover memory for your applications to use". The built-in system memory manager in OS X also consolidates and organizes memory in order to keep the system running efficiently and provide running apps with the necessary memory. The developer does nothing on their site to differentiate their product or explain how they do this better than OS X - observe below:

"IFreeMem clears Inactive memory to help your applications avoid the considerable performance hit you get when running low on Free memory." (From the iFreeMem page on Apple Downloads)

vs

"Inactive memory
This information is no longer being used and has been cached to disk, but it will remain in RAM until another application needs the space. Leaving this information in RAM is to your advantage if you (or a client of your computer) come back to it later." (From Apple's document Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor)

2. The developer makes a grossly misleading statement on their website. "iFreeMem optimize feature is a quick and easy alternative to either a reboot or RAM upgrade to get defragmented free memory." It is NOT necessary to reboot in order to get "defragmented memory". OS X recovers memory from inactive applications and applications that have quit and shuffles memory around in RAM in order to maximize the available blocks of memory. If it didn't, the system would eventually crash because not enough blocks of memory (that are large enough to be usable) would be available for newly starting processes.

Yes. If someone who DOES understand OS X's memory management looks at those claims and says that it "doesn't make any sense", that is justification for that someone to call it crapware. I don't think Mikey-San is saying "I don't understand it... it just doesn't make any sense". I think he is saying "that's bull... it doesn't make any sense".

The OP asked for a solution he did not need; he asked the wrong question, so we gave him a different answer. This is what you would've learned had you really read the thread. Read this:

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Yes, as a matter of fact. They're trying to get people to pay them for an application that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. So, crapware.

I was going to post something along the lines of what wdympcf just posted, but he beat me to it. I agree with his post; they're making wild statements about their product and not describing what it actually does, while misleading people into thinking that certain system stats suggest they need to run this magical program to "fix" their memory.

I am sorry wdymycf but you have just solidified all my points. Thank You.

Please enlighten me, so I can truly take credit for your thanks. What points have you made that I just re-enforced?

You're still missing my point though, where the OP asked the wrong question in the first place. Do you really understand the higher goal of the thread, or are you just trying to defend this app at this point?