Many of our customers ask questions about how they can reduce their RAM footprint while using Path Finder. So we thought we’d share some useful and easy to use tips with you on how to reduce RAM usage. 

But before diving into actual tips to try, let us explain some underlying information, which is valid for the macOS environment generally. 

Historically from the beginning, macOS was rather hungry on RAM usage, in comparison to other OSes. Mac developers were encouraged to use maximum of RAM available for best performance and visual experience. In exchange, the macOS offered internal solutions to all running applications to manage RAM efficiently. We describe them below.  

Path Finder running smoothly and quickly is our first priority. To do so it caches file names, icons, images and anything else it sees on your file system into the RAM, making its footprint to grow.  Without this RAM cache, every time you scrolled up or down, or switched folder Path Finder would have to reread that information from your computer which would be slow and cause stuttering.

The great thing about the RAM cache is it’s smart!  If your operating system or another application needs RAM, macOS will tell Path Finder to release some of its cache and RAM is immediately released. Another strategy of the central RAM management is to transfer the information, stored in RAM onto the hard drive temporarily, while more RAM is requested by another application – this is called Virtual Memory. The cache is one feature of macOS that makes it a great platform for writing applications!

While intensively in use, Path Finder does use lots of RAM, but it’s generally not a concern as that RAM is freed whenever needed. However, you can reduce the RAM usage, if you allow Path Finder to display less RAM hungry content. This is how you can do it:

1. Turn off syntax colorizing in preview of text-based files.

The most common reason for higher memory usage in Path Finder is syntax colorizing of text-based files in the “Preview” module. Syntax colorizer is based on JavaScript. In order to function properly, it requires the usage of JavaScript context, which is known for higher memory usage. If you preview several text files whose syntax are colorized with the programming source files, Path Finder memory usage may grow to a certain amount (approximately 1 GB) and then stop growing. However, it will go down very slowly afterward if you stop previewing text files.

The higher memory usage caused by JavaScript context should not be of any concern, as it does not impact the performance and responsiveness of Path Finder. However, if you are still concerned about higher memory usage, you can to turn off syntax colorizing in the “Preview” module. We will provide native syntax colorizer in one of the following updates to Path Finder, which will not use JavaScript and thus will not consume much memory.

2. Clean up your Desktop from unnecessary files!

Having a lot of Desktop icons can eat up RAM. Especially on modern Retina displays each icon is displayed at a very high resolution so that you have the best visual experience. All this eats up RAM resources. If you are not ready to clean up the Desktop mess right away – maybe you can consider just creating one big folder, named “Desktop mess” and transfer all your Desktop files inside. This way you will instantly free up a lot of RAM. Having a cleaned-up desktop is the most effective tip in this regard!

3. Set your default view to List or Column View

The most RAM intensive view is Icon View with preview of the icons turned on. Even if you scroll down, the already previewed icons, which are already scrolled out of your view, are still stored inside the RAM Cache for better performance. If you do choose Icon View as your default view, you might consider switching the preview of the icons off to reduce RAM footprint. To do so set Path Finder to Icon View, then go to View=>View Options (Cmd-J) and uncheck “Show icons preview”. 

 4. Set your starting directory to a folder, which is not too big or   crowded

By default, the starting directory, which is displayed by Path Finder browser is set to Home directory. This is already better RAM-wise in comparison to, say, Computer root directory, which has more folders inside. If your home directory has a lot of folders as well, you might think of setting the Starting directory for example to (cleaned up!) Desktop, or another frequently used folder, which is not too crowded. You may do so by going to Preferences=>Browser=>Starting directory

5. Set your default browser view to minimum modules possible

Especially modules containing files or icon previews, including Cover Flow and Image Browser are quite RAM hungry. If you need to use this set of modules at a regular basis, you might consider saving them as one of your browser options via File=>New Browser=>Save Browser and open it on the occasions that you really need. Making a default browser contain a lot of image-related modules, especially if opened in several windows might eat up a lot of (unnecessary) RAM.  

6. Free up hard drive space 

Make sure approx. 20% of your hard drive stays free. This hard drive space is needed for the macOS Virtual Memory manager to be able to transfer the information, stored in RAM onto the hard drive temporarily, while more RAM is requested by another application. This process will go unnoticed if your hard drive has this extra space and is not filled out. To search for unnecessary files, which may slow down your computer performance, you might use Size Browser in Path Finder. Click on the toolbar button below:

A size browser window appears and you may trash or examine files, sorted by size:

After this clean up, you will surely notice the overall increase in performance on your computer, so it is a general tip to speed up things!

 7. Please contact us if you notice an unusual behavior such as:

• Path Finder was running in the background and not really used, but the RAM usage keeps increasing, without even using the application
• You are not using any visually intensive modules or views, your hard drive is not full and you applied the tips above and the RAM usage is still unusually high
• You experience performance hog on your entire machine while using Path Finder

All those cases are not normal – it means you found a bug or a memory leak. It would help a lot if you can tell us if you can reproduce it, so that we can track the problem down. Until now the reports of such cases were quite rare. 

We would love to hear your feedback about the article. If you have any questions, suggestions or remarks, please fill free to contact us at help@cocoatech.com

Learn how to reveal and remove files or programs from your Mac with the help of Path Finder.

Hey Path Finder Community, 

One of the most useful tools in Path Finder 8.5 continues to be the Size Browser for those moments when this message appears:

You are reminded of that “free trial” of software you installed that ate up some of your storage or that movie you forgot you downloaded six months ago that has been dragging down your Mac’s performance silently ever since. In Path Finder 8.5, we added a Size Browser toolbar button to make it even easier to discover those huge and sometimes hidden files. 

Here is how to get started with Size Browser if you are new to it:

1. Choose the folder where you would like to start searching for unnecessary big files. You may start in your /Home folder, but you can simply choose /Macintosh HD or another volume to start scanning the whole drive.
2. Click on the Size Browser toolbar button. The Size Browser interface will appear.

    3. Path Finder is now scanning and calculating the sizes, wait until the spinning wheel at the right stops and all red numbers become black – this means that the calculation is complete. 

4. Browse the hierarchy – it will be sorted by size, largest to smallest. Some of the calculation might still continue, but you may already move files that you would like to the Trash immediately. If you are unsure and would like to review some files – choose “Reveal” and you will be able to open them from the main Path Finder window. 

5. Do not forget to close the Size Browser window after you are done! The size calculation procedure is CPU intensive and live, so the window staying open without purpose might continue to eat some resources without you being aware of it.  

How to delete files and apps on Mac that won’t delete:

Occasionally you might meet some “hard-necking” apps or large folders that will not delete from your Mac. This is not without a reason – most of the time they are protected by the system so that you will not delete something you did not realize you need for other functions. Given that the Path Finder audience is usually very suffocated we still want to urge a “do not try this at home” warning if you are not sure about how the actions will affect the overall performance of your Mac. If you feel confident, please proceed:

To delete undeletable files, you will have to authenticate as a superuser of your computer, known as “root” on UNIX systems (to which family macOS also belongs to). Normally you would need Terminal to do this. Path Finder will do this job for you – when you attempt to move or delete a system file a dialog box pops up where you will be prompted for an administrator password. The root password is usually identical to your system administrator password. Upon authentication, you will be able to move or delete this file from the system as a normal file by moving it into the Trash. 

To free even more space you can opt to remove some of the pre-installed standard software. There are many pre-installed programs on macOS. Some of them you use regularly, and some of them you do not open at all. Normally you would have to use Terminal and write commands to remove this software. However, in Path Finder, it becomes very easy without any complicated Terminal commands. 

1. Choose a pre-installed system program (e.g. Photo Booth) that you would like to remove and move it to Trash
2. You will be presented with the authentication dialog, mentioned above
3.  Click on “Authenticate” and enter your administrative (root) password. The file is in the Trash and you’re done!

If you would like to discover some other favorite features in Path Finder and find the dozens of ways to save your time and energy, download the full-featured 30-days Path Finder 8.5 trial here today on our home page: www.cocoatech.com/#

More than a year ago, we introduced Path Finder: Version 8. As you can read here, with that version, we started a long overdue process of overhauling the entire application. The PF 8 update added all the new features that were needed to bring Path Finder into modern days of ever-changing macOS. We continue that process with version 8.5. Even though it doesn’t bring the required amount of innovation and changes to justify a significant version bump, it still brings a lot of new fundamental things, which deserves a dedicated blog post. Moreover, since it is not a new major version, we released it for free to our community of over 100k users.

So what is the big news in this version? Continuing our pursuit for better performance, reliability, and modern code base, we replaced outdated StuffIt SDK with our own archiving engine based on system libraries and frameworks already built-in into the system. A huge change like this deserves a few lines of history.

“We were busy adding new features and capabilities, and we rarely gave any thought about archiving because it was already functioning very well. Our application overhaul process finally came to haunt us and ultimately expel StuffIt SDK this spring, with the introduction of our own archiving engine based on libarchive.”

At the time Path Finder gained the ability to archive/compress and expand/decompress archives, the most used program on macOS for such purposes was StuffIt Expander (used for expanding and bundled with OS installation) and StuffIt Deluxe (which could also handle archiving) from Smith Micro Software. Few others were coming from old MacOS 8/9 and ported to macOS using Carbon framework, but they were not widely used. Most importantly, there wasn’t any library or framework built into the system, which could handle those tasks. Besides offering above mentioned applications, Smith Micro also offered StuffIt SDK, a framework that could handle archiving/expanding task with most widely used archiving and compression formats at the time. Their SDK was a natural choice for Path Finder, which has been using it ever since version 2.0

Years were passing by and StuffIt application and SDK were becoming less and less used, as macOS was getting more and more capabilities and built-in libraries and frameworks expanding the number of tasks Path Finder could do without reaching for the help of 3rd party frameworks. Finally in 2009, macOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) came with build in libarchive library. That made a huge positive turn regarding archiving and expanding tasks in macOS without reaching for external help. Almost ten years have passed since then, and Path Finder continued using StuffIt SDK for much longer than it was necessary. We were busy adding new features and capabilities, and we rarely gave any thought about archiving because it was already functioning very well. Our application overhaul process finally came to haunt us and ultimately expel StuffIt SDK this spring, with the introduction of our own archiving engine based on libarchive.

All this brings some incredible gains and depending on archive/compression format; the new engine offers up to 30% speed improvement when archiving and even more (in some cases up to 65%) when expanding files. Path Finder can now create ZIP, that is password protected, 7-ZIP, XAR, TAR, PAX and CPIO archives, compressed with various compression formats, such as GZIP, BZIP2, Compress, XZ. Expanding support now includes ZIP, 7-ZIP, XAR, TAR, PAX, CPIO, AR, LHA/LZH, RAR and CAB archives, with various decompression filters, including XZ, LZIP, and LZMA. Worth noting is that due to the new archiving engine, the application bundle size has been reduced from 53 MB to 38.5 MB! Additionally, we didn’t just replace the old archiving engine. We took the opportunity of introducing the new one to also integrate it much better into file operations workflow. Now, archiving and expanding operations are treated as any other file operation (copy/move/delete). This includes queueing, progress bar and finish time estimation, so it is as easy to learn and use them as the rest of Path Finder.

Version 8.5 brings some other improvements as well. Since we’ve already touched file operations, we took the opportunity to improve copy/move/delete engine as well. There are speed improvements across a wide range of different file copying scenario, and the most significant gains come when copying a bunch of files in folder hierarchies on SSD volumes formatted with APFS. In this particular case, file copying can be up to three times (3x) faster, but on average, you will see a 5 – 50% increase in file copying speed. File deletion has also gained some minor speed improvements. See it in action below:

Second to saving time, we wanted to save you space on your Mac in several ways. As mentioned, the application itself is 30% smaller, some new archiving and compression formats sport better compression ratio (like 7-ZIP and LHA/LZH/LZMA). Additionally, we wanted to make files that take up tons of space, easier to find. We have had the Size Browser as a tool for many years, but many people did not know about it and had a hard time finding it. So, we added a button to it right in the toolbar as a default.

Size Browser shows the list of files and folders inside a selected folder ordered by size so you can find the large ones you forgot about and delete or compress them.

One more thing we did to save you time is to add a new “undo” panel in case you mistakenly moved a file or performed any other undoable operation and want to undo it quickly. Again, undoing actions was always possible, but we just made it easier and more apparent. In case you don’t want to be reminded of undoable actions, uncheck “Show undo panel” in Path Finder preferences.

Finally, we want to rest assure you that we listen to users feedback. We are aware of issues, small bugs, and feature requests you send to us, and we take all of them seriously. We are continually working on them to improve Path Finder in general. We are also currently working on a comprehensive Path Finder Manual. If you have pro tips to share, please reach out to kimberly@cocoatech.com. We will happily credit your unique contributions. All those activities and difficulties that we are facing in implementation deserve a dedicated blog post, so look for our next blog post in a few weeks. To be sure not to miss it, please sign up for our e-newsletter on our home page and find us on Facebook & Twitter. We hope our loyal users recognize the efforts we consistently put in to make Path Finder the best file management experience for MacOS. Enjoy the Path Finder 8.5 update and keep your eyes peeled for partner offers and more news right around the corner! May you have many productive hours with PF 8.5 coming in your future.