Originally Posted By: plantsower
I just used the free version but even though it said it freed up my ram, I didn't notice a difference on my old mac. Under storage it says that both of my 2 gig storages of RAM are in use. So even though I hardly use any of my other memory, my RAM is almost filled up for some reason. I wonder if that's why it's so slow and has the beachball.

Just saying your RAM is almost filled up means very little in MacOS any more because of the way memory is used. In older versions of OS X when the system got short of RAM it would immediately dump data to swap files on the hard drive which materially impacted performance. In MacOS much of what used to go into swap files on the HD is now compressed and remains in RAM which takes almost no time to decompress and use when needed so it MacOS tries to keep the RAM filled as much as possible to make the system run faster and more efficiently.

Open Activity Monitor (it is in the /Applications/Utilities folder) and click on the Memory tab at the top of the window. Then look at the bottom of the window where you will see a box labelled Memory Pressure and in that box is an interactive graph of "Memory Pressure" if the bar is Green then no matter how much of your RAM is being used the system is operating at peak efficiency, but if it is Red and/or nearly fills the box then you are short of memory and the only relief for your slow speed is more RAM or fewer open applications. Another indication on that same screen is how much Swap is used. If that is a large number that is not good.

If you want to see what Task is using your memory, click on the Memory column and that will sort the running tasks by the amount of memory they are using. Safari 12, like almost any browser, is a big memory user but for example at this moment on my system it is using less than ½ GB of RAM with one window open, so it is pretty efficient in memory usage.

There are two apps that can tell you a LOT about your system and identify potential problems. Etrecheck that will scan for lots of problems that can effect system performance. It is a free download and will provide lots of usable information (it keeps getting more informative) but some of the really detailed analysis and automatic scanning requires a paid subscription. The latest version offers explanations that do not require a PhD in computer Science to interpret but if you have trouble with interpretation, someone here can surely help you. MalwareBytes also has a free download and 30 day trial to rid your system of malware that may also negatively impact your systems performance.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein