Hi all - best wishes for 2022: last year was pretty tough for so many of us…
Anyway I have a MacBook Pro, late 2013. It will run Big Sur but not Monterey. I haven’t got a budget to get a new MacBook and was quite happy to accept any consequent limitations for at least the next few months. The machine is fast enough for me and has lots of nice connection sockets, so in theory I should be happy.
However, recently the machine, which I keep up to date, has started misbehaving. It restarts spontaneously with a “restarted because of a problem” comment which is meaningless to me. It seems mostly related to kernel panics following a watchdog timeout, whatever that is. I can just about live with that.
What I can’t live with is several warnings per day that I’ve run out of application memory when I haven’t, as can be seen via Activity Monitor: sometimes I get the warning when all that’s open in the Finder. I tried to get help on the Apple forums for this, and came across some very hostile remarks about CleanMyMac, an app I’ve used for years, which demonstrably gets rid of junk on the machine. The hostile tone really surprised me, and I wondered if there was some special pleading involved.
Has anyone here come across this set of problems, and if so was CMM involved? I feel I need to hear from an unbiased source.
I too was getting the Out of Application Memory error.
Try looking in Activity Monitor for some daemon running in the background and kill it. I don’t remember which one it was but researched it and discovered it was not needed and moved it out of the system folder and restarted and haven’t seen the error since.
I have used Clean My Mac for many users without a problem. It app updater and app remover are very helpful.
My biggest problem is Firefox makes the fans spin, but I don’t want to switch to Safari or Chrome. I suppose I should file a bug report with bugzilla.
I used to use CleanMyMac, but stopped primarily because I no longer found that it justified continuing the annual subscription.
While CleanMyMac is definitely one of the better ‘cleaning’ apps out there, the category has had some notable rogues in its ranks, hence the low opinion from techies. The other thing to bear in mind is that they can do more harm that good if you’re overzealous in applying their tools to your Mac environment. I keep iStat Menu around to monitor how my system is running, though if some app is using a lot of CPU power I’d probably know that already. With 48GB of RAM installed, it would take a seriously misbehaving app to generate an 'out of memory warning!
Hi, I am wandering thru and saw your post which made me curious.
FWIW, I have a mid-2012 MBP 15" w/ 16GB RAM running 10.13 High Sierra. This machine has been fast enough only until recently, and only recently it’s still fast enough, just not as fast as my work machine which is a 2020 MBP on 11.6.1. The main place I see slowdowns are with Twitter Tweetdeck refreshes and web page loads.
I suppose if it helps, I see that Firefox and Chrome are taking up 7GB and 4GB respectively, and some rando Adobe processes (I don’t even use Adobe software if I can possibly help it) taking up 3 GB each. I think the main benefit of buying a newer machine at this point is to have hardware graphics processing fast enough to keep up with web browsers doing all their syncing.
But perhaps CleanMyMac isn’t getting at some really fundamental logs or app databases or startup items (like the Adobe software I’m mentioning above). I’m planning on restarting and checking Activity Monitor and such to find out what is going on. I also use OmniDiskSweeper to manually remove cruft.
Sorry about the hostility - such is life online; so unpleasant. Good luck.
My 2020 iMac was having kernel panics like this, and the eventual solution was to disconnect as many peripherals as possible and then add them back slowly. I never really figured out why that worked, and I think I got back to using everything. I suspect some sort of USB wonkiness. If you have a USB hub with various things plugged in, I’d start with that.
As far as the out-of-memory errors go, you might try running Apple Diagnostics too (also called Apple Hardware Test) just to make sure you don’t have some actual RAM errors.
Barring that, a fresh install of Big Sur might be warranted.