October 20, 2026
How to free up RAM on a Mac in 2026
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When a Mac runs short of memory, switching apps takes much longer, and even the mouse cursor becomes laggy. macOS may even warn that your system has run out of application memory. The fix is to find what holds the memory and close it. First, though, check whether you have a shortage at all: the number that tells you is Memory Pressure in Activity Monitor, and free RAM says very little.
This guide covers RAM, the working memory your apps run in. If your Mac is warning about a full disk instead, see how to clear disk space on Mac. We checked every step in October 2026 on a MacBook Pro with an M1 chip and 8 GB of memory, running macOS 27 Golden Gate. The screenshots and figures come from that Mac.
This article contains:
- Quick answer: how to free up RAM on a Mac right now
- Low memory symptoms: likely cause and fix
- How Mac memory works: unified memory, compression and swap
- Do you need to free up RAM? Check Memory Pressure and Swap Used
- What is using your Mac's memory
- How to free up RAM on a Mac
- "Your system has run out of application memory": what to do
- How to keep memory usage down
- How much RAM does a Mac need in 2026?
- FAQs
Quick answer: how to free up RAM on a Mac right now
A high Memory Used figure on its own is normal. Act only when the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom of Activity Monitor’s Memory tab turns yellow or red. Then work through these five steps in order:
- Quit the app at the top of Activity Monitor’s Memory list: sort by the Memory column, select the app, click the X button and choose Quit.
- Close browser tabs you aren’t using, or turn on Memory Saver in Chrome.
- Force quit a frozen app with Option‑Command‑Esc.
- Restart your Mac from Apple menu → Restart. It’s the only built‑in way to reset a memory leak in a macOS process such as WindowServer.
- Free up disk space if your startup disk has less than about 20 GB left. macOS writes swap to that disk.
Low memory symptoms: likely cause and fix
A memory shortage shows up in a few recognizable ways. Find your symptom in the table, then go to the matching fix below.
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Spinning beachball when you switch apps | Yellow or red pressure: macOS is reading swapped data back from the disk | Quit the heaviest app |
| “Your system has run out of application memory” | A leaking app, or too little free disk space for swap | Force quit the app with the biggest figure in the dialog, then free disk space |
| Safari reloads a page on its own | The page used so much memory that Safari reloaded it under pressure | Close tabs and keep heavy web apps to one tab |
| Swap Used grows every day | Your workload is bigger than your RAM, or an app leaks slowly | Restart, then watch for an app whose Memory figure keeps rising |
| One process shows tens of gigabytes | A memory leak | Quit the app, or restart if it belongs to macOS |
| Fans run while the Mac sits idle | CPU load: fans react to processor work, while a memory shortage makes the Mac stall | Check the CPU tab in Activity Monitor |
How Mac memory works: unified memory, compression, and swap
Apple silicon Macs use unified memory: the CPU, the GPU and the Neural Engine share one pool of RAM. Graphics, Apple Intelligence features, and heavy web pages draw from the same memory as your apps. 8 GB of unified memory holds as much data as 8 GB anywhere else, but the GPU’s share comes out of it. That’s why an 8 GB M1 might feel tighter than an 8 GB Intel Mac with a separate graphics card.
macOS also fills spare memory with copies of recently opened files, shown as Cached Files. Those files reopen faster, and macOS hands the space to any app that asks for it. Apple’s Activity Monitor guide puts it plainly: free memory “does not necessarily improve” performance. macOS “obtains the best performance by efficiently using and managing all of your computer’s memory.”
Note:
It’s a myth that free RAM is good RAM. Actually, a Mac with almost no free memory is working as designed. macOS refills Cached Files within minutes of a cleanup, and a real shortage shows up in the Memory Pressure graph.
When apps need more room, macOS first drops cached files. Then it compresses memory that hasn’t been used recently. Apple introduced compression in OS X Mavericks and says it shrinks those items to about half their original size. Activity Monitor shows the result as Compressed.
If that still leaves too little room, macOS moves compressed data to the startup disk. That’s swap, shown as Swap Used. Apple silicon SSDs are fast, so moderate swap is barely noticeable. Heavy daily swap is different: apps stall while data comes back from the disk, and every gigabyte written wears the SSD. On Apple silicon MacBooks, that SSD is soldered to the logic board, so replacing it is expensive.
The sequence below shows why near‑zero free memory is normal, and where the real warning signs start.
| Stage | What macOS does | What you see in Activity Monitor |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Memory is spare | Fills it with recently used files | Cached Files grows, free memory sits near zero |
| 2. Apps ask for more | Hands cached memory over to the apps | Cached Files shrinks, pressure stays green |
| 3. Memory runs short | Compresses data that hasn’t been used recently | Compressed grows |
| 4. Still short of room | Moves compressed data to the startup disk | Swap Used grows, pressure turns yellow |
| 5. Swap can’t keep up | Pauses apps and asks you to quit some | The out‑of‑memory dialog appears, pressure turns red |
Do you need to free up RAM? Check Memory Pressure and Swap Used
Open Activity Monitor from Applications → Utilities, or press Command‑Space and type its name. Older guides might send you through Launchpad, but it was removed back in macOS Tahoe 26. Click the Memory tab and look at the panel at the bottom of the window.
Each field in that panel answers one question:
- Memory Pressure: how hard macOS is working to find memory. The color of the graph is the verdict.
- Physical Memory: the RAM installed in your Mac.
- Memory Used: everything apps and macOS use right now. It normally sits close to Physical Memory.
- App Memory: memory that apps and system processes have claimed.
- Wired Memory: memory macOS keeps for itself. It can’t be compressed or moved to the disk.
- Compressed: data macOS has squeezed to make room.
- Cached Files: copies of recently used files, handed to apps the moment they need the space.
- Swap Used: data moved out to the startup disk to make room.
On our test MacBook Pro, Chrome, Telegram, Zoom, Spotify and Claude were open. The panel read 6.96 GB used of 8 GB, with 3.33 GB compressed and 6.24 GB of swap, and the graph was yellow. Cached Files had already dropped to about 1 GB, so macOS had used up its easy reserve.
Apple defines the three colors in its Activity Monitor guide, and each one calls for a different response:
| Memory Pressure | Apple’s meaning | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Green | “Your computer is using all of its RAM efficiently.” | Nothing. High Memory Used and some swap are normal at this level. |
| Yellow | “Your computer might eventually need more RAM.” | Quit the heaviest app and close tabs you don’t need. |
| Red | “Your computer needs more RAM.” | Quit apps now, then restart. If the graph turns red most days, your work needs a Mac with more memory. |
Swap Used needs the same context. A few hundred megabytes to a couple of gigabytes under load is routine. An 8 GB Mac can even carry several gigabytes of swap while pressure stays green. The warning sign is swap that grows by several gigabytes through the day while the graph sits in yellow or red.
Pro Tip
Terminal has text versions of both readings.
memory_pressure
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sysctl vm.swapusage
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What is using your Mac’s memory
Five kinds of processes take most of the memory on a modern Mac:
- Apps: browsers, apps built on Electron (Slack, Discord, VS Code, Microsoft Teams), photo and video editors, virtual machines, and local AI models. Each Electron app carries its own copy of a browser engine.
- Browser tabs and extensions: browsers run tabs as separate processes. Activity Monitor lists them as Google Chrome Helper (Renderer), or as Safari Web Content or the site’s address. Extensions run as processes of their own.
- Background items: launch agents, menu bar utilities, and cloud clients such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive keep running without a window.
- WindowServer: the macOS process that draws every window on screen. It grows with more displays, more open windows and transparency effects.
- Memory leaks: processes that keep taking memory and never give it back.
On our test Mac, Telegram led the list at 761 MB, a figure that looks harmless. Chrome spread its load across seven processes in the top 13, and together they held about 3.5 GB, close to half of the Mac’s RAM. To see a browser’s real total, choose View → All Processes, Hierarchically. Activity Monitor then groups every helper process under its app.
WindowServer sat at 548 MB on the same Mac. It can use well over 1 GB, and closing windows you aren’t using brings it down. After macOS Tahoe 26 introduced the Liquid Glass design, many Apple silicon owners reported WindowServer growing on Apple Support Communities.
A leak looks like a number that only goes up. The app’s Memory figure climbs while you keep doing the same work, and it stays high after you close documents and windows. In June 2026, Oakley named Pages and sometimes Mail as the likeliest offenders. Large documents or mailboxes pushed them to 9 GB or more. Reports of a leak in dasd, the macOS background task scheduler, came from the macOS 27 betas and stopped by beta 3 or 4. On our 27.0.1 test Mac, dasd didn’t appear among the biggest memory users.
To find the culprit, sort the Memory tab by the Memory column. Make sure View → All Processes is ticked, so system processes show too. Check the list again after 10 or 15 minutes of normal work: a process that keeps climbing while your workload stays the same is leaking. Quitting an app returns all of its memory, and a leak in a macOS process needs a restart.
How to free up RAM on a Mac
The fixes that work on a modern Mac all reduce demand: they close whatever holds the memory. The methods below run from the biggest real effect to the smallest, and they work the same way on Apple silicon and Intel Macs. Apple silicon memory can’t be upgraded, though, so your habits matter more there.
The table compares the six methods at a glance:
| Method | What it frees | How long it lasts | Effort | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quit or force quit an app | Everything that app holds, including its swapped data | Until you reopen the app | Seconds | Pressure is yellow or red |
| Close tabs and extensions | The memory of each tab or extension process | Until you open them again | A minute | The browser tops the Memory list |
| Turn off login items | Memory held by apps and helpers that start at login | Until you turn them back on | A few minutes, once | Pressure is high soon after startup |
| Restart | All memory, including leaks in macOS processes; swap starts from zero | Until a leak builds up again | A couple of minutes | A macOS process keeps growing, or swap climbs for days |
| RAM cleaner app | Mostly Cached Files | Minutes | One click, or automatic | You run an older Intel Mac with little RAM |
| sudo purge | Cached Files only | Minutes | Terminal and an admin password | You are measuring performance |
Quit or force quit the app using the most memory
Quitting the heaviest app frees its memory at once, including what macOS had compressed or swapped for it. In Activity Monitor:
- Click the Memory tab.
- Click the Memory column header so the biggest users sit at the top.
- Select the app, then click the X button at the top of the window.
- Choose Quit when Activity Monitor asks “Are you sure you want to quit this process?” If the app has stopped responding, choose Force Quit.
Three shortcuts do the same job faster:
- Press Command‑Q in the app itself. Closing its last window with the red button often leaves the app running in memory.
- Press Option‑Command‑Esc to open Force Quit Applications, select the frozen app and click Force Quit.
- Right‑click the app’s icon in the Dock, hold Option, and choose Force Quit.
Warning
Force Quit closes the app immediately, so unsaved changes are lost, as Apple’s guide to quitting a process points out. Leave kernel_task, WindowServer and loginwindow alone. Quitting WindowServer or loginwindow logs you out, and Activity Monitor warns you before it happens.
Background daemons such as dasd start again automatically if you quit them in Activity Monitor. If the same process climbs back within the hour, restart the Mac instead.
Close browser tabs and remove extensions
Every tab and every extension holds memory of its own. Closing the tabs you don’t need is the fastest win, and each browser has a tool that does part of the work for you.
Chrome: Turn on Memory Saver in Settings → Performance. Chrome then frees memory from inactive tabs and reloads them when you go back.
To see which tab or extension weighs the most, choose Window → Task Manager. It lists every tab and extension with its memory footprint, and End Task closes the one you select.
Safari: Safari pauses background tabs on its own, and under memory pressure, it reloads pages that use too much memory. Extensions are the part you control. Open Safari → Settings → Extensions and untick the ones you don’t use.
about:processes
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Turn off login items and background app activity
Apps that start at login hold memory all day, even when you never open them. macOS 27 lists them in one place:
- Open System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions.
- Under Open at Login, select an app you don’t need at startup and click the minus (−) button.
- Under Background App Activity, turn off the switch for apps that don’t need to run in the background. macOS shows whether each one is running right now.
Older releases use other labels. Tahoe 26 calls the background list App Background Activity, and Ventura 13 to Sequoia 15 call it Allow in the Background. Before Sequoia the pane is plain Login Items, and on Monterey 12 and earlier it lives in System Preferences → Users & Groups.
Turning off a background item leaves the app’s files in place, and the change takes effect after the app or the Mac restarts. Menu bar utilities count too: each one is a separate process that runs until you quit it.
Note:
Apps you have already deleted can leave launch agents behind in
~/Library/LaunchAgents
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/Library/LaunchAgents
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/Library/LaunchDaemons
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Restart your Mac to clear a memory leak
A restart resets every process, including macOS processes you can’t quit. macOS also deletes its swap files during the restart, so swap starts again from zero. Restart when you see one of these signs:
- WindowServer or another macOS process holds several gigabytes.
- Swap Used keeps rising for hours.
- Pressure stays yellow with no heavy apps open.
Choose Apple menu → Restart. If one app caused the leak, untick Reopen windows when logging in in the confirmation dialog. Otherwise, macOS reopens that app with all its windows.
uptime
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Check Swap Used a few minutes after the restart, then again at the end of the day. If swap climbs back to several gigabytes during normal work, your workload is bigger than your RAM.
Should you use a RAM cleaner app?
sudo purge
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That’s why experienced Mac users are skeptical. On an Apple silicon Mac with a fast SSD, they believe the gain from a cleanup is close to zero.
The short‑term effect is easier to notice on an older Intel Mac with 4–8 GB of RAM and a hard drive or Fusion Drive. Those Macs can’t move to macOS 27, and our free Memory Cleaner supports macOS 11 and later. It shows memory use in the menu bar and lists the apps using the most memory. It quits them in one click and can clean up automatically when memory use runs high.
On a modern Mac, the useful part of a memory app is visibility: seeing pressure rise and knowing which app caused it.
Terminal: what sudo purge does and doesn’t free
sudo purge
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So purge shrinks Cached Files and Memory Used for a few minutes. App Memory, Wired Memory and Compressed stay as they were. A leaking app keeps leaking, and swap already written to the disk stays there. Afterward, your Mac reads files from the SSD again until the cache refills.
TL;DR
sudo purge
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To see the effect yourself:
- Open Terminal from Applications → Utilities.
- Type and press Return.
sudo purgeCopy
- Enter your administrator password and press Return. Terminal shows no characters while you type it.
- Wait a few seconds. The Mac may freeze for up to 10 seconds while the cache empties.
sudo
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“Your system has run out of application memory”: what to do
This dialog appears when macOS can no longer make room by compressing and swapping. On macOS 27 it reads “Your system has run out of application memory.” It adds: “To avoid problems with your computer, quit any applications you are not using.” Below the message, it lists your open apps with the memory each one uses. Apps that macOS has paused are marked (paused).
Two causes account for most cases. Either the startup disk is too full for swap to grow, or one app has leaked memory until no room is left. Third‑party firewalls, VPN clients, security tools and “optimizer” apps also come up in Apple Support Communities threads about this dialog.
An app showing tens of gigabytes in that list is leaking. After the macOS Tahoe 26.0.1 update, The Mac Observer reported Calculator at 42.31 GB on an 8 GB M1 MacBook Air. Pages reached 175.41 GB before the alert appeared.
When the dialog appears, take these steps:
- Select the app with the largest memory figure and click Force Quit.
- Check free space in System Settings → General → Storage. If less than about 20 GB is free, delete or move files before you reopen anything.
- Open Activity Monitor, choose View → All Processes, and sort by Memory to catch a background process the dialog leaves out.
- Restart the Mac if the dialog comes back.
How to keep memory usage down
These habits keep pressure in the green between restarts.
Leave room on the startup disk. Swap lives on the startup disk, so a nearly full disk turns a memory shortage into a freeze. Keep at least 10–15% of the disk free, and never let it drop below about 20 GB. Disk Space Analyzer shows which folders take the space. MacCleaner Pro bundles it with junk cleanup and Duplicate File Finder.
Install updates. Apple fixes memory leaks in point releases, so check System Settings → General → Software Update. Update your apps as well. Electron fixed a macOS 26 bug that drove up CPU use in its apps, so older builds of Slack, Discord and VS Code need the update.
Turn down transparency. WindowServer draws the Liquid Glass transparency and blur, and on Apple silicon the GPU shares its memory pool with your apps. Turn on System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Reduce transparency to take that work off WindowServer. The difference is biggest with several displays or an external one.
macOS 27 also has a milder option: the Liquid Glass slider in System Settings → Appearance. Drag it all the way to the right for the most opaque, tinted look. Moving the slider can switch Reduce transparency off again, so pick one of the two settings.
Choose lighter apps. Safari usually uses less memory than Chrome on a Mac, and native apps use less than Electron apps. Running Slack or Teams in a browser tab shares the browser’s processes instead of starting a separate app.
Note:
A cluttered desktop does not eat your RAM. Finder draws desktop icons and previews, but that memory is small next to a single browser tab. Tidy the desktop to find files faster, and close tabs to save memory.
How much RAM does a Mac need in 2026?
Every Mac that runs macOS 27 keeps its memory inside the Apple silicon chip package. Apple’s support pages say this memory “can’t be upgraded”, and you choose the amount when you buy the Mac. So size it for the next five years of use.
Every current Mac starts at 16 GB. The exception is the $599 MacBook Neo, launched in March 2026 with 8 GB of unified memory and no upgrade option. The table matches memory sizes to typical workloads:
| Memory | Typical use | What runs comfortably | Trade‑offs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 GB (MacBook Neo, older Macs) | Browser, email, office apps, light tasks | Several tabs, documents, messaging, streaming | Swap is unavoidable as the load grows; little headroom for future macOS versions |
| 16 GB | The baseline for most people | Many apps at once, Apple Intelligence, photo editing, coding, light video editing | Heavy video editing and virtual machines hit the limit |
| 24–32 GB | 4K video, virtual machines, large projects | 4K editing, Docker and virtual machines, big codebases | Too little for large local language models |
| 64 GB and more | Local AI models, 3D, professional video | Local language models, 3D rendering, 8K and ProRes RAW editing | Expensive, and more than everyday work needs |
Your own Memory Pressure graph is the best test. If it stays green through a normal working day, you have enough RAM. If it turns yellow every day, buy more memory with your next Mac.
Note:
You can’t add RAM to an Apple silicon Mac later. The memory is part of the chip package. System Information shows an Upgradeable Memory entry only on older Intel iMacs, Mac minis and Mac Pros, and macOS 27 runs on none of them.
To check how much memory your Mac has, choose Apple menu → About This Mac and read the Memory line.
For the details, hold Option, choose Apple menu → System Information, and click Memory under Hardware. On Apple silicon the page lists only the size, type and maker of the memory.
The bottom line
Read Memory Pressure before you free anything. Green means the full memory bar is macOS doing its job. Yellow or red means an app, a tab or a leak is taking more memory than your Mac has. Find it and close it: quit the heaviest app, trim tabs and login items, and restart when a macOS process keeps growing.
Commands and cleaners that empty Cached Files raise the free‑memory number for a few minutes, and then macOS fills the cache again. On an Apple silicon Mac the memory you buy is the memory you keep, so choose 16 GB or more if you can. If pressure stays green and the Mac still feels slow, the cause lies elsewhere. Our guide on how to speed up a slow Mac covers CPU, disk and startup fixes.
Frequently asked questions
How do I free up RAM on a Mac without restarting?
Quit the app at the top of Activity Monitor's Memory list, close browser tabs you don't need, and turn off login items you don't use. All three free real memory immediately. You need a restart only when a macOS process such as WindowServer is leaking.
Does restarting a Mac clear the RAM?
Yes. A restart empties memory, ends every leaking process and deletes the swap files. It's the only built‑in way to reset a leak in a macOS process you can't quit.
How do I check memory pressure on a Mac?
Open Activity Monitor from Applications → Utilities and click the Memory tab. The Memory Pressure graph sits in the bottom‑left corner of the window. Green means your Mac has enough memory, while yellow and red mean it's running short.
Why does my Mac use almost all of its RAM when only a few apps are open?
macOS fills spare memory with Cached Files on purpose and hands it back the moment an app needs it. A full Memory Used bar is normal, so check the Memory Pressure graph instead. If pressure stays high with few apps open, look for a leaking process, and treat malware as a less likely cause.
What are Cached Files in Activity Monitor, and should I clear them?
~/Library/Caches
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How much swap is normal on a Mac, and does it wear out the SSD?
A few hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes is routine, even with green pressure. Worry when swap grows every day while pressure stays yellow or red. Heavy daily swap is also the main source of SSD wear for most users.
Is it safe to use sudo purge, and does it make a Mac faster?
It's safe: purge empties the disk cache and leaves app data alone. It doesn't make a Mac faster. Cached Files shrinks for a few minutes, and apps read their files from the disk again until macOS rebuilds the cache.
Why is WindowServer using so much memory?
WindowServer draws every window on your screens, so its memory grows with more displays, more open windows and transparency effects. Close windows you aren't using and turn on Reduce transparency. If it keeps growing over days of uptime, restart the Mac: quitting WindowServer logs you out.
Do RAM cleaner apps work on Apple silicon Macs?
They free Cached Files, which macOS refills within minutes, so the gain fades fast. The useful part of a memory app is visibility. A menu bar readout and a list of the heaviest apps make it easier to decide what to close.
Can I add more RAM to an Apple silicon MacBook?
No. On Apple silicon the memory is part of the chip package and can't be upgraded, so the amount you choose at purchase is permanent. Only older Intel iMacs, Mac minis and Mac Pros take extra RAM, and macOS 27 runs on none of them.
Is 8 GB of RAM enough on a Mac in 2026?
For a browser, email, documents and streaming, yes, with some swap. For heavy multitasking, photo work or coding, 16 GB is the comfortable baseline, which is why every current Mac except the $599 MacBook Neo starts there. If Memory Pressure stays green for most of the day, 8 GB covers your work.
Is my Mac slow because of low RAM or low disk space?
Check both. Yellow or red Memory Pressure with rising swap points to RAM. Less than about 20 GB free on the startup disk points to disk space, and it makes memory problems worse, because swap has no room to grow.