MemGauge shows your Mac's real memory health at a glance — and which apps are using it
MemGauge shows your Mac's real memory health at a glance — and which apps are using it. It lives in the menu bar, tells you the truth, and skips the snake oil: there is no "free up RAM" button, because on modern macOS those do nothing useful.
THE REAL HEALTH SIGNAL: MEMORY PRESSURE
A big "used" number is not a problem — modern macOS is supposed to use your memory. What actually matters is memory pressure, and MemGauge puts it front and center:
• A green / amber / red pressure indicator in the panel.
• The menu-bar icon itself is tinted by pressure, so you can see your memory health without clicking anything. High usage with no pressure stays green — that's a healthy system, not an emergency.
• Optional alerts: get notified the moment pressure turns amber or red.
AN HONEST BREAKDOWN
• "X GB of Y GB used" — counted exactly the way Activity Monitor counts it.
• A segmented bar: App Memory, Wired, Compressed, Other, and Cached Files — so you can see that "used" isn't all the same kind of used.
• Swap usage, shown whenever your system is swapping.
• A rolling chart of the last couple of minutes of usage.
WHICH APPS ARE USING IT
A live list of your running apps sorted by memory, with their icons. Click an app to bring it to the front so you can decide for yourself whether to quit it. MemGauge never quits anything behind your back — you stay in control.
HONEST ABOUT ITS LIMITS
Browsers split their memory across helper processes that a sandboxed App Store app cannot see, so browser totals show the main process only — and MemGauge says so right in the panel instead of showing you a confident wrong number. Per-app figures are resident memory sizes and are labeled approximate.
BUILT TO STAY OUT OF THE WAY
• Menu-bar only — no Dock clutter, no windows to manage.
• Launch at Login — set it once and forget it.
• Tiny footprint: one lightweight reading every two seconds — adjustable in Settings.
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
• No account, no sign-in.
• No network access at all — nothing about you or your Mac ever leaves your device.
• No tracking, no analytics, no data collection.
• Fully sandboxed.
MemGauge does one job and does it honestly: it shows you what your memory is really doing, and leaves the decisions to you.