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I have a MacBook Pro, 15-inch, 2017 running Ventura 13.0.1. It occasionally acts sluggish. Since using CleanMyMac to free up RAM, activity monitor shows "0" for physical memory used. It has been this way for over a week. Is this something to be concerned about? Is there a way to check if memory management is working properly?

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    Don't use Clean My Mac to "free up RAM". It's totally unnecessary, & often counter-productive. Empty RAM is wasted RAM. Reboot & see what it looks like afterwards. You've definitely been hammering the RAM hard at some point since last reboot, >9GB swap is going some.
    – Tetsujin
    Dec 8, 2022 at 18:20

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Free RAM is wasted RAM. The OS is designed to use as much RAM as it can. I have 32Gb RAM, and the value of "Memory Used" added to "Cached Files" is nearly always 32Gb.

Furthermore, RAM usage is not like "a jug filling with water":- there is memory compression, caching, swap, virtual memory, and all kinds of other tricks.

If you have a problem with your Mac being sluggish, then you need to find out what the cause is before you can fix it. Are any processes using high CPU? Are any processes using large amounts of memory?

Tools like CleanMyMac are largely unnecessary, and not beneficial for troubleshooting.

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