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I've tried to observe how this app works.

It actually forces OS X's native memory management to kick in.

It does this by using an obscene amount of memory for a very short amount of time. This forces OS X to clean up the existing RAM in use as the RAM used by Memory Cleaner builds up dramatically.

In this way its partially cosmetic since your RAM would be cleaned up if you used more of it anyway.

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There are tricks that iOS Devs (including me) use to make iOS cleanup after itself, for example iOS can take its sweet time releasing memory from MKMapViews even after the controller is gone so a trick is to switch the Map Type just before the controller is released as it forces iOS to drop the cache for the current map type. So yeah, I've not used that program but I assume it's using similar tricks in OSX.

But that's talking about memory usage tricks within a process, which is a totally different beast from what this app claims to do.

So what exactly is the problem with it taking its "sweet time"? Isn't that just a way of saying it will wait until it actually needs the memory to drop the cache?

Perhaps if there was a significant performance hit incurred when dropping caches you may want to do it more eagerly.. but is there?

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