Now purge will run for you with whatever time frame you entered (in the example, every 2 hours, every day, at the top of the hour) You can change this to just * for every hour, or */6 for every 6 hours, or whatever. The 0 indicates the top of the hour (change to 30 if you wanted it to run at 30 minutes after the hour for example) Google crontab for details on how it works.Īdd this line to the crontab you now have open: You need to insert a new line to run purge on a scheduled basis. Google “VIM commands” if you don’t know how to use it). When you run this command, it will open up the crontab in an editor (probably vim. For most people, this will be empty initially. So the above command says to edit the root user’s crontab, which is a list of scheduled tasks. sudo is a command to allow you to run things as root. Note: You may need to have XCode & Developer Tools installed in order to use the purge command, that can be downloaded for free from the Mac App Store.įor those wishing to automate the running of purge, open a terminal and enter this command: “sudo crontab -e”. If you feel like you are frequently hitting a memory ceiling learn how to check if your Mac needs a RAM upgrade and consider upgrading, it can dramatically improve overall system performance. This is not necessary for most Mac users, but power users and those with heavy memory demands will undoubtedly find this command helpful in the future. Of course, the benefit of using purge rather than rebooting is that you don’t have to restart the machine and you can maintain currently active applications while still freeing up memory. The purge command forces disk and memory caches to be emptied, offering a ‘cold disk buffer cache’ which is similar to the state of the operating system after a reboot.

Open Activity Monitor to see the before and after results yourself, you’ll find dramatic changes at the “Free”, “Used”, and “Inactive” meters under System Memory.

Note: some versions of OS X may not require you to prefix the purge command with sudo, while running with sudo will require authentication, like so:

Give OS X a minute or two to complete the process.

Launch Terminal, found in /Applications/Utilities/ and enter the following command.

Gimp mac os x lion 10.7.5