Question

For anyone unfamiliar with the Purge command, it cleans out inactive memory. I guess it’s included with the dev tools. I assumed that’s how other apps like iFreeMem, iMemoryCleaner, iCleanMemory and others do it. However, the purge command won’t work if the dev tools aren’t present.

Any alternatives that work the same way without the dev tools installed?

Answer 1

There’s never any reason to run the purge command unless you’re a developer. It will only ever decrease system performance (by purging cached data, requiring the system to reload data from the hard disk).

That being said, you can take a look at how purge works with the otool -tV command. It appears to use an undocumented function called CPOSXPurgeAllDiskBuffers().