PSA: Don’t Forget to Reboot Your Mac to Free Memory from kernel_task

Thank you for posting this.  This was an argument I had with engineers at Apple (while I worked there.) Clearing and purging caches, as in proper memory management, is a task the operating system SHOUDL do regularly.  Same for cache files on the drive, which the system will do automatically, IF you leave you computer run over night all the time (chron jobs that execute in the early morning.) 

But for some reason, the OS engineers at Apple, as great as they are, could not seem to make this happen. Partially because security issues where one task cannot affect the memory space of another. You cannot put all cache files in the system owned memory, as that could be a potential security problem. So it would come down to enforcing apps to properly do their own memory management for cache files and memory, and that is not always the case. 

A reboot of a computer should never be a necessary step to a well running system. Other than some large mini (PDP for example) and main frame machines (IBM like for example) I have worked on do not properly mange memory and files. Microsoft is a worse offender, but Apple is right there near the top as well. 

So for now, I shutdown in the evening (after running the clean up cron job early) and restart fresh in the morning. Sad that this is the case.