Mountain Lion How-to: Reduce the RAM usage

I talk about RAM on my Macbook running OS X Mountain Lion in this latest post; while writing my mind fly away with a MacBook Air.

I use to be the Windows desktop dude with the ego to have more RAM the better on the system attitude. It was easy when you have a desktop with plenty of empty RAM slots on the motherboard; need more RAM? All you need to do is go out and buy RAM then add it into the spare slots.

Laptop form factor simply lacks room for more RAM slots for upgrading. The Apple newer laptop; you have zero room adding RAM.

Keep your desktop clean

I have tried this on my MacBook and it is proven to reduce my RAM usage by 50%. The key is to keep your desktop clean at all times.

thisbeast-desktop

My Mountain Lion desktop with only finder, documents folder, downloads folder and trash in the Dock. Keep it simple keep it clean will reduce your memory usage as much as 2GB of RAM.

thisbeast-Launchpad

If you like iOS, Mountain Lion is so cool in this regard. Pinch with thumb and three fingers bring out your Launchpad.

Basically this is my desktop and how I access my apps on Mountain Lion on a daily basis.

Memory Clean by FIPLAB for Mountain Lion

I installed Memory Clean in Oct and it’s a handy little app that clears your inactive memory from your system. The app makes it easy for you to see how much RAM been “eaten” by your system and with a touch of a button, the app went to work its magic.

FIPLAB Memory Clean

Caution: Please don’t do anything intensive while you are cleaning your memory with Memory Clean.

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Sent from my iPad

3 responses to “Mountain Lion How-to: Reduce the RAM usage”

  1. You can reduce memory consumption of some applications by switching them back to 32-bit. E.g. Firefox and Thunderbird. Most applications don’t need 64-bit, so it shouldn’t do any harm running them in 32-bit mode.

    • I never thought of that. In fact, I thought it was the other way round. I need to give it a try. I assume most of the apps does the same trick to reduce memory consumption?

      Thanks for the head up Harald Walker.

      • 10-15% for 32 vs 64 bit, on the other hand – they can lack in performance… and if return to memory usage – when you use 64 bit system, some memory is shared between all apps (shared libraries), when you use 32 bit app – it will load 32 bit libraries…. so the saving ram efficiency can be close to zero