Native pressure first
Menu-bar health status starts with macOS Memory Pressure rather than treating raw RAM percentage as the decision.
PRODUCT · SWIFT · MACOS
Memory cleanup with rules you can explain.
A macOS menu bar app that watches native Memory Pressure, Swap and process risk, then asks eligible long-idle background apps to quit under explicit rules while protecting the apps that should stay running.
01 / PRODUCT IDEA
High RAM usage is not automatically a problem.
GreenRAM prioritizes native macOS Memory Pressure, then considers Swap and process risk. Cached Files are shown separately as reclaimable memory so a high percentage alone does not trigger a false warning.
Safe quit requests
Cleanup asks selected background apps to quit normally. It does not claim to “clear Swap” or kill the current frontmost app.
Multi-process accounting
Browsers, Electron apps, Xcode helpers and similar trees are accounted for as application memory rather than isolated helper processes.
02 / CLEANUP POLICY
Three groups, three different rules.
Eligibility is based on explicit categories, background time and memory decisions — not vague app-name heuristics.
WhitelistProtected apps are never quit. GreenRAM itself and the current frontmost app are also always excluded.
Auto-Quit AppsSmall utilities can be configured to quit after a non-frontmost timeout only; RAM and Swap do not participate.
Ordinary appsAfter the background-time threshold, cleanup still requires either a MemoryDecisionEngine decision or that app's own memory limit.
03 / RUN IT
Build locally with SwiftPM.
Release packages are Universal 2 for Apple Silicon and Intel. The current personal-use archive is ad-hoc signed and not Apple-notarized.
swift build -c release swift run GreenRAM
On first launch of the current personal-use build, Gatekeeper quarantine may need to be removed manually after copying GreenRAM.app to /Applications. A future public distribution should use Developer ID signing and Apple notarization.
What GreenRAM deliberately never quits
GreenRAM itself, the current frontmost app, whitelisted apps, background apps that have not reached their timeout, and ordinary apps while the decision engine reports healthy and the app remains below its own memory limit.